1 



PSYCHOLOGY 
AND LIFE 



BY 



HUGO MUNSTERBERG 

It 

PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

GLty fitajstoe $re#£, Cambridge 

1899 



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COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY HUGO MUNSTERBERG 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



TWO CQP L . .iV£D f 






APR 2 11899 









TO 

MY OLD FRIEND 

HEINRICH RICKERT 

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY 

OF FREIBURG (BREISGAU) 



PREFACE 

The following volume contains six essays 
which have been brought before the public dur- 
ing the last year at very different opportunities. 
The paper on History was delivered as the presi- 
dential address before the New York meeting 
of the American Psychological Association, and 
was published in the " Psychological Review." 
That on Education was read before the Harvard 
Teachers' Association at their last Cambridge 
meeting and printed in the "Educational Re- 
view." The essay on Physiology is an exten- 
sion of a paper read before the American Phy- 
siological Society in New York, and has not as 
yet been published. The three other papers 
appeared in the " Atlantic Monthly." That on 
Mysticism was read before the Buffalo meeting 
of the Unitarian Ministers' Institute, and before 
the Philosophical Department of Princeton Uni- 
versity ; that on Art was written for the Detroit 
meeting of the American Drawing - Teachers' 
Association, and that on Real Life was an ad- 



vi PREFACE 

dress to Wellesley College. Two other papers 
on educational problems which I have also pub- 
lished during the last year in the " Atlantic 
Monthly " series, the one under the title " The 
Danger from Experimental Psychology/' and the 
other " The Teacher and the Laboratory/' are 
not reprinted here because the one was chiefly 
the criticism of a book and the other a rejoinder 
to an attack, but they may be mentioned here 
as supplementary interpretations of my educa- 
tional views. 

While the six essays were thus presented at 
first to very various audiences, this book is in no 
way a chance collection of disconnected pieces. 
The contrary is true. They represent six chap- 
ters of a book which was from the first planned 
as a unity, and the separate publication of the 
special parts is merely accidental. The group 
should decidedly be taken as a whole. One 
fundamental thought controls the book, and 
each essay leads only from a different point to 
the same central conviction. 

This chief aim is the separation of the con- 
ceptions of psychology from the conceptions of 
our real life. Popular ideas about psychology 
suggest that the psychological description and 
explanation of mental facts expresses the reality 



PREFACE vii 

of our inner experience. It is a natural con- 
sequence of such a view that our ethical and 
aesthetical, our practical and educational, our 
social and historical views are subordinated 
to the doctrines of psychology. These papers 
endeavor to show that psychology is not at 
all an expression of reality, but a complicated 
transformation of it, worked out for special logi- 
cal purposes in the service of our life. Psycho- 
logy is thus a special abstract construction which 
has a right to consider everything from its own 
important standpoint, but which has nothing to 
assert in regard to the interpretation and appre- 
ciation of our real freedom and duty, our real 
values and ideals. The aim is thus a limitation 
of that psychology which wrongly proclaims its 
results as a kind of philosophy ; but this limita- 
tion, which makes the traditional conflicts with 
idealistic views impossible, gives at the same 
time to the well-understood psychology an abso- 
lute freedom in its own field, and the whole 
effort is thus as much in the service of psycho- 
logy itself as in the service of the rights of life. 
A scientific synthesis of the ethical idealism with 
the physiological psychology of our days is thus 
my purpose. Every unscientific and unphilo- 
sophical synthesis remains there necessarily an 



viii PREFACE 

insincere compromise in which science sacrifices 
its consistency and idealism sacrifices its beliefs ; 
it is the task of true synthesis to show how the 
one includes the other, and how every conflict is 
a misunderstanding. 

The first paper gives the fundamental tone 
and characterizes the problem of the whole book. 
The second paper, on Physiology, develops the 
real functions of a scientific psychology, and 
defends its absolute freedom in the consistent 
construction of theories of mind and brain. The 
following three papers show in three important 
directions, in art, education, and history, how 
such a consistent psychology, even though most 
radical, cannot interfere with the conceptions and 
categories which belong to the activities of life 
and to their historical aspect. The last paper 
finally makes a test for this separation, showing 
that just as psychology is not to interfere with 
the conceptions of life, these latter must not 
interfere with the conceptions of psychology ; 
wherever this happens, the scientific aspect of 
mental life goes over into mysticism. 

The isolated appearance of the different essays 
has made it necessary that each could be under- 
stood alone without presupposing the knowledge 
of the foregoing papers; frequent repetitions 



PREFACE ix 

were thus unavoidable. It would have been 
easy to eliminate these in reprinted f orm, and to 
link the papers so that each should presuppose 
acquaintance with the preceding parts. But I 
have finally decided not to change anything and 
to publish them again in a form in which every 
paper can be understood for itself, because I 
think that in a subject so difficult and so antago- 
nistic to the popular view the chief points of 
the discussion can have impressive effect only if 
they are brought out repeatedly, always in new 
connections and from new points of view. They 
may be clear, perhaps, at a first reading, but 
may become convincing only when they are 
reached from the most different starting-points. 
If the axe does not strike the same spot several 
times, the tree will not fall. 

It may appear still less excusable that when- 
ever I have had to return to the same points, I 
have made use of the same expressions like 
stereotyped phrases. The effect would have 
been of course much prettier if I had applied 
a rich variety instead of such a monotony of 
terms. But it seems to me that in such compli- 
cated problems exactness and sharpness of the 
technical terms is the condition for clearness and 
consistency, which cannot be replaced by a more 



x PREFACE 

or less sesthetical enjoyment. I do not want to 
entertain by these papers, I want to fight; to 
fight against dangers which I see in our public 
life and our education, in art and science ; and 
only those who intend serious and consistent 
thought ought to take up this unamusing book. 
I say frankly, therefore, that this little volume 
is not written for those who kindly take an 
interest in the psychological discussions of the 
essays, but do not care for the philosophical part 
which belongs to every one. For such readers 
much more attractive treatises on the new psy- 
chology are abundant. And there is a second 
group of possible readers to whom also I should 
seal the little book if I had the power. I refer 
to those who heartily agree with my general 
conclusion that no conflict between science and 
the demands of life exists, but who base this 
attitude merely on feeling and emotion, and who 
thus dread the indirect method of abstract con- 
ceptions, all the more since they are not troubled 
by a demand for consistency in science. I have 
nothing in common with them ; I am not a mis- 
sionary of the Salvation Army. And, finally, 
I must warn still a third group whose exist- 
ence I should not have suspected if it had not 
shown most vehement symptoms of life after the 



PREFACE xi 

publication of some of my " Atlantic Monthly " 
papers. I have in mind those who consider a 
critical examination of the rights and limits of a 
science as an attack against that science, instead 
of seeing that it is the chief condition for a 
sounJ and productive growth ; the triumph 
through confusion is in the long run never a real 
gain for a science. Those who, perhaps with 
anger, perhaps with delight, consider my warn- 
ing against a dangerous misuse of psychology, 
pedagogy, and so on, as an onslaught against 
psychology or pedagogy itself, certainly mis- 
understand my intentions. 

Finally, I wish to express my thanks to the 
Assistant in the Psychological Laboratory of 
Radcliffe College, Miss Ethel Puffer, for the 
revision of my manuscript, and to the Assistant 
in the Psychological Laboratory of Harvard Uni- 
versity, Dr. Robert MacDougall, for the revision 
of the proofs. It is needless to say that in 
spite of their helpful retouching of my language, 
the whole cast shows the style of the foreigner 
who is a beginner in the use of English, and 
who must thus seriously ask for the indulgence 

of the reader. 

Hugo Munsterberg. 

Harvard University, February, 1899. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Psychology and Life 1-34 

1. The standpoint of naturalism .... 1 

The psychological view of personality . . 4 

The psychological view of life and duty . . 9 

The standpoint of reality 15 

The idealistic view of life 23 

The idealistic view of psychology ... 28 
Psychology and Physiology .... 35-99 

1. Hopes and fears from physiological psychology . 35 

The empirical relations between mind and brain 40 

The description of mental facts .... 44 

The explanation of mental facts ... 53 

The physiological explanation of mental facts . 60 

The usefulness of the psychophysical functions . 68 
The biological development of the psychophysical 

apparatus 

Mistakes of association and apperception 

ries 

9. The advantages of an action theory 
Psychology and Education .... 100 
1. The teaching of psychology . 

Psychology of the child .... 
Methods and limits of child psychology 
Child psychology, experimental psychology. 

siological psychology 121 

The value of psychology for the teacher . . 128 

The value of psychology for pedagogy . . . 135 

Psychology and Art 145-178 

1. The artist as psychologist 145 

2. The psychical causes of the work of art . . 152 

3. The psychical effects of the work of art . . 157 

4. Drawing instruction in schools .... 163 



theo- 



74 

81 
91 
-144 
100 
106 
112 



phy- 



CONTENTS 



The psychological aspect and the reality 

The philosophical aspect of art and art instruc- 



169 



tion 



v Psychology and History .... 

1. The idealistic tendencies of our time 

2. Laws and special facts 

3. Description and explanation . 

4. The real subjects .... 

5. Science and art .... 

6. The causal and the teleological aspects 

7. The task of history 

8. History and causality 

9. History and the normative sciences 
Psychology and Mysticism 

1. The psychological claims of mysticism 
The scientific aspect .... 
Hypnotic suggestion 
Christian science and mind cure 
Double consciousness . 
Examination of the claimed facts 
The mechanical and the emotional view 



. 174 

179-228 
. 179 

185 
. 191 

195 
. 200 

205 
. 210 

217 

. 223 

229-282 

. 229 

234 
. 239 

244 
. 249 

253 
. 262 



9. 



The emotional categories applied to psychophysi- 
cal processes 269 

Telepathy and spiritualism ; immortality . . 275 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 



The world of science and learning, as well as 
the social world, has its alternating seasons and 
its capricious fashions. Mathematics and phi- 
losophy, theology and physics, philology and his- 
tory, each has had its great time ; each was once 
favored both by the leaders of knowledge and 
by the crowd of imitating followers. The nine- 
teenth century, which began with high philo- 
sophical inspirations, has turned decidedly toward 
natural science ; the description of the universe 
by dissolving it into atomistic elements, and the 
explanation of it by natural laws without regard 
for the meaning and value of the world, has 
been the scientific goal. But this movement 
toward naturalistic dissolution has also gone 
through several phases. It started with the 
rapid development of physics and chemistry, 
which brought as a practical result the wonderful 
gifts of technique. From the inorganic world 
scientific interest turned toward the organic 
world. For a few decades, physiology, the science 



2 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

of the living organism, enjoyed an almost unsur- 
passed development, and brought as its practical 
outcome modern medicine. From the functions 
of the single organism public interest has been 
drawn to the problems of the evolution of the 
organic world as a whole. Darwinism has in- 
vaded the educated quarters, and its practical 
consequence has been rightly or wrongly a revo- 
lution against dogmatic traditions. 

Finally, the interests of the century have gone 
a step farther, — the last step which naturalism 
can take. If the physical and the chemical, the 
physiological and the biological world, in short 
the whole world of outer experience, is atomized 
and explained, there remains only the world of 
inner experience, the world of the conscious 
personality, to be brought under the views of 
natural science. The period of psychology, of 
the natural science of the mental life, began. 
It dawned ten, perhaps fifteen years ago, and 
we are living in the middle of it. No Edison 
and no Roentgen can make us forget that the 
great historical time of physics and physiology is 
gone ; psychology takes the central place in the 
thought of our time, and overflows into all 
channels of our life. It began with an analysis 
of simple ideas and feelings, and it has de- 
veloped to an insight into the mechanism of the 
highest acts and emotions, thoughts and crea- 
tions. It started by studying the mental life 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 3 

of the individual, and it has rushed forward to 
the psychical organization of society, to social 
psychology, to the psychology of art and science, 
religion and language, history and law. It be- 
gan with an increased carefulness of self-obser- 
vation, and it has developed to an experimental 
science, with the most elaborate methods of tech- 
nique, and with scores of great laboratories in 
its service. It started in the narrow circles of 
philosophers, and it is now at home wherever 
mental life is touched. The historian strives to- 
day for psychological explanation, the economist 
for psychological laws; jurisprudence looks on 
the criminal from a psychological standpoint; 
medicine emphasizes the psychological value of 
its assistance; the realistic artist and poet fight 
for psychological truth ; the biologist mixes psy- 
chology in his theories of evolution ; the philolo- 
gist explains the languages psychologically ; and 
while aesthetical criticism systematically coquets 
with psychology, pedagogy seems ready even to 
marry her. 

As the earlier stages of naturalistic interests, 
the rush toward physics, physiology, biology, 
were each, as we have seen, of characteristic 
influence on the practical questions of real life, 
it is a matter of course that this highest and 
most radical type of naturalistic thinking, the 
naturalistic dissolution of mental life, must stir 
up and even revolutionize the whole practical 



4 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

world. From the nursery to the university, from 
the hospital to the court of justice, from the 
theatre to the church, from the parlor to the 
parliament, the new influence of psychology on 
the real daily life is felt in this country as in 
Europe, producing new hopes and new fears, 
new schemes and new responsibilities. 

Let us consider the world we live in, from the 
point of view of this new creed. What becomes 
of the universe and what of the human race, 
what becomes of our duty and what of our 
freedom, what becomes of our friends and what 
of ourselves, if psychology is not only true, but 
the only truth, and has to determine the values 
of our real life ? 

II 

What is our personality, seen from the psy- 
chological point of view? We separate the 
consciousness and the content of consciousness. 
From the standpoint of psychology, — I mean a 
consistent psychology, not a psychology that 
lives by all kinds of compromises with philosophy 
and ethics, — from the standpoint of psychology 
the consciousness itself is in no way a person- 
ality ; it is only an abstraction from the totality 
of conscious facts, — an abstraction just as the 
conception of nature is abstracted from the na- 
tural physical objects. Consciousness does not 
do anything; consciousness is only the empty 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 5 

place for the manif oldness of psychical facts ; it 
is the mere presupposition making possible the 
existence of the content of consciousness, but 
every thought and feeling and volition must be 
itself such a content of consciousness. Person- 
ality, too, is thus a content ; it is the central 
content of our consciousness, and psychology 
can show in a convincing way how this funda- 
mental idea grows and influences the develop- 
ment of mental life. We know how the whole 
idea of personality crystallizes about those tac- 
tual and muscular and optical sensations which 
come from the body ; how at first the child does 
not discriminate his own limbs from the outside 
objects he sees ; and how slowly the experiences, 
the pains, the successes, which connect them- 
selves with the movements and contacts of this 
one body, blur into the idea of that central 
object, our physical personality, into which the 
mental experiences become gradually introjected. 
Psychology shows how this idea of the Ego 
grows ste;adily side by side with the idea of the 
Alter, and how it associates with itself the whole 
manifoldness of personal achievements and ex- 
periences. Psychology shows how it develops 
toward a sociological personality, appropriating 
everything which works in the world under the 
control of our will, in the interest of our influ- 
ence, just as our body works, including thus our 
name and our clothing, our friends and our work, 



6 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

our property and our social community. Psy- 
chology shows how, on the other hand, this idea 
can shrink and expel everything which is not 
essential for the continuity of this central group 
of psychical contents. Our personality does not 
depend upon our chance knowledge and chance 
sensations; it remains, once formed, if we lose 
even our arms and legs with their sensations; 
and thus the personality becomes that most 
central group of psychical contents which ac- 
company the transformation of experiences into 
actions; that is, feelings and will. Thus psy- 
chology demonstrates a whole scale of personali- 
ties in every one of us, — the psychological one, 
the sociological one, the ideal one ; but each one 
is and can be only a group of psychical contents, 
a bundle of sensational elements. It : s an idea 
which is endlessly more complicated, but theo- 
retically not otherwise constituted, than the 
idea of our table or our house ; just as, from 
the point of view of chemistry, the isubstance 
which we call a human body is theoretically not 
otherwise constituted than any other physical 
thing. The influence of the idea of personality 
means psychologically, then, its associative and 
inhibitory effects on the mechanism of the other 
contents of consciousness, and the unity and 
continuity of the personality mean that causal 
connection of its parts by which anything that 
has once entered our psychical life may be at 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 7 

any time reproduced, and may help to change 
the associative effects which come from the idea 
of ourselves. 

Has this psychological personality freedom of 
will? Certainly. Everything depends in this 
case upon the definitions, and the psychologist 
can easily construct a conception of freedom 
which is in the highest degree realized in the 
psychophysical organism and its psychological 
experiences. Freedom of will means to him 
absence of an outer force, or of pathological 
disturbance in the causation of our actions. We 
are f r 3e, as our actions are not the mere outcome 
of conditions which lie outside of our organism, 
but tne product of our own motives and their 
normal connections. All our experiences and 
thoughts, our inherited dispositions and trained 
habits, our hopes and fears, cooperate in our 
consciousness and in its physiological substratum, 
our brain, to bring about the action. Under 
the same outer conditions, somebody else would 
have acted otherwise ; or we ourselves should 
have preferred and done something else, if our 
memory or our imagination or our reason had 
furnished some other associations. The act is 
ours, we are responsible, we could have stopped 
it; and only those are unfree, and therefore 
irresponsible, who are passive sufferers from an 
outer force, or who have no normal mental 
mechanism for the production of their action, a 



8 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

psychophysical disturbance which comes as a 
kind of outer force to paralyze the organism, be 
it alcohol or poison, hypnotism or brain disease, 
which comes as an intruder to inhibit the regular 
free play of the motives. 

Of course, if we should ask the psychologist 
whether this unfree and that free action stand 
in different relations to the psychological and 
physiological laws, he would answer only with a 
smile. To think that freedom of will means in- 
dependence of psychological laws is to him an 
absurdity; our free action is just as much de- 
termined by laws, and psychologically just as 
necessary, as the irresponsible action of the hyp- 
notized or of the maniacal subject. That the 
whole world of mental facts is determined by 
laws, and that therefore in the mental world 
just as little as in the physical universe do won- 
ders happen, is the necessary presupposition of 
psychology, which it does not discuss, but takes 
for granted. If the perceptions, associations, 
feelings, emotions, and dispositions are all given, 
the action must necessarily happen as it does. 
The effect is absolutely determined by the com- 
bination of causes ; only the effect is a free 
one, because those causes lay within us. To be 
sure, those causes and motives in us have them- 
selves causes, and these deeper causes may not 
lie in ourselves. We have not ourselves chosen 
all the experiences of our lives ; we did not our- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 9 

selves pick out the knowledge with which our 
early instruction provided us ; we have not our- 
selves created those brain dispositions and talents 
and tendencies which form in us decisions and 
actions. Thus the causes refer to our ancestors, 
our teachers and the surrounding conditions of 
society, and with the causes must the responsi- 
bility be pushed backwards. The unhealthy 
parents, and not the immoral children, are re- 
sponsible ; the unfitted teacher, and not the mis- 
behaving pupil, should be blamed ; society, and 
not the criminal, is guilty. To take it in its 
most general meaning, the cosmical elements, 
with their general laws, and not we single mor- 
tals, are the fools ! 

Ill 

The actions of personalities form the substance 
of history. Whatever men have created by their 
will in politics and social relations, in art and 
science, in technics and law, is the object of the 
historian's interest. What that all means, seen 
through the spectacles of psychology, is easily 
deduced. The historical material is made up 
of will functions of personalities; personalities 
are special groups of psychophysical elements; 
free-will functions are necessary products of the 
foregoing psychophysical conditions ; history, 
therefore, is the report about a large series of 
causally determined psychophysical processes 



10 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

which happened to occur. But it is a matter 
of course that the photographic and phono- 
graphic copy of raw material does not constitute 
a science. Science has everywhere to go for- 
ward from the single unconnected data to the 
general relations and connections. Consequently, 
history as a scientific undertaking is not satisfied 
with the kinematographic view of all the mental 
processes which ever passed through human 
brains, but it presses toward general connection, 
and the generalizations for single processes are 
the causal laws which underlie them. The aim 
of history, then, must be to find the constant 
psychological laws which control the develop- 
ment of nations and races, and which produce 
the leader and the mob, the genius and the 
crowd, war and peace, progress and social dis- 
eases. The great economic and climatic factors 
in the evolution of the human race come into 
the foreground; the single individual and the 
single event disappear from sight ; the extraor- 
dinary man becomes the extreme case of the 
average crowd, produced by a chance combi- 
nation of dispositions and conditions; genius 
and insanity begin to touch each other ; nothing 
is new ; the same conditions bring again and 
again the same effects in new masks and gowns ; 
history, with all its branches, becomes a vast de- 
partment of social psychology. 

But if the free actions of historical per- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 11 

sonalities are the necessarily determined func- 
tions of psychophysical organisms, what else are 
and can be the norms and laws which these per- 
sonalities obey? Certainly, the question which 
such laws answer, the question what ought to 
be, does not coincide with the question what is ; 
but even that " ought " exists only as a psychical 
content in the consciousness of men, as a con- 
tent which attains the character of a command 
only by its associative and inhibitory relations to 
our feelings and emotions. In short, it is a 
psychical content which may be characterized by 
special effects on the psychological mechanism of 
associations and actions, but which is theoreti- 
cally coordinated to every other psychical idea, 
and which grows and varies, therefore, in human 
minds, under the same laws of adaptation and 
inheritance and tradition as every other mental 
thing. Our ethical laws are, then, the necessary 
products of psychological laws, changing with 
climate and race and food and institutions, types 
of action desirable for the conservation of the 
social organism. And just the same must be 
true for sesthetical and even for logical rules 
and laws. Natural processes have in a long 
evolutionary development produced brains which 
connect psychological facts in a useful corre- 
spondence to the surrounding physical world ; 
an apparatus which connects psychical facts in 
a way which misleads in the outer physical 



12 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

world is badly adapted, and must be lost in 
the struggle for existence. Logical laws are, 
then, just so many types of useful psychical pro- 
cesses, depending upon the psychophysical laws, 
and changing with the conditions and complica- 
tions of life. 

The psychologist will add : Do not feel wor- 
ried by that merely psychological origin of all 
our inner laws. Is not their final goal also in 
any case only the production of a special psy- 
chophysical state ? What else can our thinking 
and feeling and acting strive for than to pro- 
duce a mental state of agreeable character ? We 
think logically because the result is useful for 
us ; that is, secures the desired agreeable, prac- 
tical ends. We seek beauty because we enjoy 
beautiful creations of art and nature. We act 
morally because we wish to give to others also 
that happiness which we desire for ourselves. 
In short, the production of the psychological 
states of delight and enjoyment in us and others, 
and the reduction of the opposite mental states 
of pain and sorrow, are the only aim and goal of 
a full, sound life. Were all the disagreeable 
feelings in human consciousness replaced by 
happy feelings, one psychological content thus 
replaced by another, heaven would be on earth. 

But psychology can go one more step for- 
ward. We know what life means to it, but 
what does the world mean ? What is its meta- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 13 

physical credo ? There need not be much specu- 
lative fight about it. All who understand the 
necessary premises of psychology ought to agree 
as to the necessary conclusions. Psychology 
starts with the presupposition that all objects 
which have existence in the universe are physical 
or psychical, objects in matter or objects in con- 
sciousness. Other objects are not perceivable 
by us, and therefore do not exist. To come 
from this to a philosophical insight into the ulti- 
mate reality, we must ask whether these physical 
and psychical facts are equally true. To doubt 
that anything at all exists is absurd, as such 
a thought shows already that at least thoughts 
exist. The question is, then, only whether both 
physical and psychical facts are real, or physical 
only, or psychical only. The first view is philo- 
sophical dualism; the second is materialistic 
monism ; and the third is spiritualistic monism. 
Psychology cannot hesitate long. What ab- 
surdity to believe in materialism, or even in 
dualism, as it is clear that in the last reality all 
matter is given to us only as idea in our con- 
sciousness ! We may see and touch and hear 
and smell the physical world, but whatever we 
see we know only as our visual sensations, and 
what we touch is given to us as our tactual sen- 
sations ; in short, we have an absolute knowledge 
which no philosophical criticism can shake, only 
in our own sensations and other contents of con- 



14 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

sciousness. Physical things may be acknow- 
ledged as a practical working hypothesis for the 
simple explanation of the order of our sensations, 
but the philosophical truth must be that our psy- 
chical facts alone are certain, and therefore un- 
doubtedly real. 

Only our mind-stuff is real. Yet I have no 
right to call it " ours," as those other per- 
sonalities whom I perceive exist also only as my 
perceptions ; they are philosophically all in my 
own consciousness, which I never can transcend. 
But have I still the right to call that my con- 
sciousness ? An I has a meaning only where a 
Thou is granted ; where no Alter is there cannot 
be an Ego. The real world is, therefore, not 
my consciousness, but an absolutely impersonal 
consciousness in which a series of psychical states 
goes on in succession. Have I the right to call it 
a succession ? Succession presupposes time, but 
whence do I know about time ? The past and 
the future are given to me, of course, only by 
my present thinking of them. I do not know 
the past ; I know only that I at present think 
the past ; the present thought is, then, the only 
absolutely real thing. But if there is no past 
and no future, to speak of a present has no 
meaning. The real psychical fact is without 
time as without personality; it is for nobody, 
for no end, and with no value. That is the last 
word of a psychology which pretends to be 
philosophy. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 15 

IV 

Now let us return to our starting-point : are 
we really obliged to accept this view of the 
world as the last word of the knowledge of our 
century? Can our historical and political, our 
ethical and aesthetical, our logical and philosoph- 
ical thinking, — in short, can the world of our 
real practical life be satisfied with such a credo ? 
And if we wish to escape it, is it true that we 
have to deny in our conscience all that the cen- 
tury calls learning and knowledge ? Is it true 
that only a mysterious belief can overcome such 
positivistic misery, and that we have to accept 
thus the most anti-philosophical attitude toward 
the world which exists ; that is, a mixture of 
positivism and mysticism ? 

To be sure, we cannot, no, we cannot be satis- 
fied with that practical outcome of psychology, 
with those conclusions about the final character 
of personality and freedom, about history and 
logic and ethics, about man and the universe. 
Every fibre in us revolts, every value in our real 
life rejects such a construction. We do not feel 
ourselves such conglomerates of psychophysical 
elements, and the men whom we admire and con- 
demn, love and hate, are for us not identical with 
those combinations of psychical atoms which pull 
and push one another after psychological laws. 
We do not mean, with our responsibility and 



16 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

with our freedom in the moral world, that our 
consciousness is the passive spectator of psycho- 
logical processes which go on causally determined 
by laws, satisfied that some of the causes are 
inside of our skull, and not outside. The child 
is to us in real life no vegetable which has to be 
raised like tomatoes, and the criminal is no weed 
which does not feel that it destroys the garden. 

Does history really mean for us what psycho- 
logical and economical and statistical laws put in 
its place? Are " heroism" and " hero-worship" 
empty words? Have Kant and Fickte, Carlyle 
and Emerson, really nothing to say any more, 
and are Comte and Buckle our only apostles? 
Do we mean, in speaking of Napoleon and Wash- 
ington, Newton and Goethe, those complicated 
chemical processes which the physiologist sees in 
their life, and those accompanying psychical pro- 
cesses which the psychologist enumerates between 
their birth and their death ? Do we really still 
think historically, if we consider the growth of 
the nations and this gigantic civilization on earth 
as the botanist studies the growth of the mould 
which covers a rotten apple ? Is it really only a 
difference of complication ? 

But worse things are offered to our belief. 
We are asked not only to consider all that the 
past has brought as the necessary product of 
psychological laws, but also to believe that all 
we are striving and working for, all our life's 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 17 

fight, — it may be the noblest one, — means 
nothing else than the production of some psy- 
chological states of mind, of some feelings of 
agreeableness ; in short, that the tickling sensa- 
tions are the ideal goal of our life. The great- 
est possible happiness of the greatest possible 
number, that discouraging phrase in which the 
whole vulgarity of a naturalistic century seems 
condensed, is it really the source of inspiration 
for an ideal soul, and does our conscience really 
look out for titillation in connection with a ma- 
jority vote ? 

If you repeat again and again that there are 
only relative laws, no absolute truth and beauty 
and morality, that they are changing products 
of the outer conditions without binding power, 
you contradict yourself by the assertion. Do 
you not demand already for your skeptical denial 
that at least this denial itself is an absolute 
truth ? And when you discuss it, and stand for 
your conviction that there is no morality, does 
not this involve your acknowledgment of the 
moral law to stand for one's conviction ? If you 
do not acknowledge that, you allow the infer- 
ence that you yourself do not believe that which 
you stand for, and that you know, therefore, 
that an absolute morality does exist. Psycho- 
logical skepticism contradicts itself by its pre- 
tensions ; there is a' truth, a beauty, a morality, 
which is independent of psychological condi- 



18 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

tions. When such ideal duties penetrate our 
life, we cannot rest at last in a psychological 
metaphysics where the universe is an impersonal 
content of consciousness ; and every straightfor- 
ward man, to whom the duties of his real life 
are no sounding brass, speaks with a calm voice 
to the psychologist : There are more things in 
heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your 
philosophy. 

Is there really no possible combination of these 
two attitudes? Certainly such combination is not 
given by an inconsistent compromise. If we say 
to the intellect, Go on with your analyzing and 
explaining psychology, but stop halfway, before 
you come to practical acting; and say to our 
feeling and conscience, Go on with your noble 
life, but do not try to think about it, for all your 
values would show themselves as a poor illusion ; 
then there remains only one thing doubtful, 
whether the conscience or the intellect is in the 
more pitiful state. Thinking that is too faint- 
hearted to act, and acting that is ashamed to 
think, are a miserable pair who cannot live to- 
gether through a real life. No such coward 
compromise comes here in question, and still less 
do we accept the position that the imperfectness 
of the sciences of to-day must be the comfort of 
our conscience. 

The combination of the two attitudes is possi- 
ble ; more than that, it is necessary in the right 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 19 

interests of both sides, as the whole apparent 
contradiction rests on an entire misunderstand- 
ing. It is not psychology that contradicts the 
demands of life, but the misuse of psychology. 
Psychology has the right and the duty to con- 
sider everything from the psychological stand- 
point, but life and history, ethics and philosophy, 
have neither the duty nor the right to accept 
as a picture of reality the impression which is 
reached from the psychological standpoint. 

We have asked the question whether the psy- 
chical objects or the physical objects, or both, 
represent the last reality ; we saw that dualistic 
realism and materialism decided for the last two 
interpretations, while psychology voted for the 
first. It seems that one of these three decisions 
must be correct, and just here is the great mis- 
understanding. No, all three are equally wrong 
and worthless ; a fourth alone is right, which 
says that neither the physical objects nor the 
psychical objects represent reality, but both are 
ideal constructions of the subject, both deduced 
from the reality which is no physical object, no 
psychical object, and even no existing object at 
all, as the very conception of an existing object 
means a transformation of the reality. Such 
transformation has its purpose for our thoughts 
and is logically valuable, and therefore it repre- 
sents scientific truth ; but this truth nevertheless 
does not reach the reality of the untransformed 



20 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

life. It is exactly the same relation as that be- 
tween natural science and materialism. Natural 
science considers the world as a mechanism, and 
for that purpose transforms the reality in a most 
complicated and ingenious way. It puts in the 
place of the perceivable objects unperceivable 
atoms which are merely products of mathemati- 
cal construction quite unlike any known thing; 
and nevertheless these atoms are scientifically 
true, as their construction is necessary for that 
special logical purpose. To affirm that they are 
true means that they are of objective value for 
thought. But it is absurd to think, with the 
materialistic philosopher, that these atoms form 
a reality which is more real than the known 
things, or even the only reality, excluding the 
right of all not space-filling realities. The phy- 
sical science of matter is true, and is true with- 
out limit and without exception ; materialism is 
wrong from beginning to end. There is, in- 
deed, no physical object in the world which 
natural science ought not to transmute into 
atoms, but no atom in the world has reality ; 
and these two statements do not contradict each 
other. 

In the same way psychology is right, but the 
psychologism which considers the psychological 
elements and their mechanism as reality is wrong 
from its root to its top, and this psychologism is 
not a bit better than materialism. It makes 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 21 

practically no difference whether the real sub- 
stance is of the clumsy space-filling material or 
of the finer stuff that dreams are made of ; both 
are existing objects, both are combinations of 
atomistic indivisible elements, both are in their 
changes controlled and determined by general 
laws, both make the world a succession of causes 
and effects. The psychical mechanism has no 
advantage over the physical one ; both mean a 
dead world without ends and values, — laws, 
but no duties ; effects, but no purposes ; causes, 
but no ideals. 

There is no mental fact which the psychologist 
has not to metamorphose into psychical elements ; 
and as this transformation is logically valuable, 
his psychical elements and their associative and 
inhibitory play are scientifically true. But a 
psychical element, and anything which is thought 
as combination of psychical elements and as 
working under the laws of these psychical con- 
structions, has as little reality as have the atoms 
of the physicist. Our body is not a heap of 
atoms ; our inner life is still less a heap of ideas 
and feelings and emotions and volitions and 
judgments, if we take these mental things in the 
way the psychologist has to take them, as con- 
tents of consciousness made up from psychical 
elements. If it is understood that the function 
of any naturalistic science is not to discover a 
reality which is more real than our life and its 



22 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

immediate battlefield, but only to transform the 
reality in a special way, then it must be clear 
that the demands of our real life can never be 
contradicted by the outcome of the empirical 
sciences. The sciences, therefore, find their 
way free to advance without fear till they have 
mastered and transmuted the physical and the 
psychical universe. 

But we can go a step farther. A contradic- 
tion is the more impossible since this transforma- 
tion is itself under the influence of the elements 
of real life, and by that the apparent ruler 
becomes the vassal. If psychology pretends 
that there is no really logical value, no absolute 
truth, because everything shows itself under 
psychological laws, we must answer, This very 
fact, that we consider even logical thinking 
from the psychological point of view, and that 
we have psychology at all, is only an outcome of 
the primary truth that we have logical ends and 
purposes. Logical thinking creates psychology 
for its own ends ; psychology cannot be itself 
the basis for logical thinking. And if psy- 
chology denies all values because they prove 
to be psychical fancies only, we must confess 
that this striving for the understanding of the 
world by transforming it through our science 
would have no meaning if it were not work 
toward an end which we appreciate as valuable. 
Every act of thought, every affirmation and 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 23 

denial, every yes or no which constitutes a scien- 
tific judgment, is an act of a will which ac- 
knowledges the over-individual obligation to 
decide so, and not otherwise, — acknowledges 
an " ought," and works thus for duty. Far 
from allowing psychology to doubt whether the 
real life has duties, we must understand that 
there is no psychology, no science, no thought, 
no doubt, which does not by its very appearance 
solemnly acknowledge that it is the child of 
duties. Psychology may dissolve our will and 
our personality and our freedom, and it is con- 
strained by duty to do so, but it must not forget 
that it speaks only of that will and that person- 
ality which are by metamorphosis substituted for 
the personality and the will of real life, and that 
it is this real personality and its free will which 
create psychology in the service of its ends and 
aims and ideals. 



In emphasizing thus the will as the bearer of 
all science and thought, we have reached the 
point from which we can see the full relations 
between life and psychology. In the real life 
we are willing subjects whose reality is given in 
our will attitudes, in our liking and disliking, 
loving and hating, affirming and denying, agree- 
ing and fighting ; and as these attitudes overlap 
and bind one another, this willing personality 



24 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

has unity. We know ourselves by feeling our- 
selves as those willing subjects ; we do not per- 
ceive that will in ourselves; we will it. But 
do we perceive the other subjects ? No, as little 
as ourselves. In real life, the other subjects also 
are not perceived, but acknowledged ; wherever 
subjective attitudes stir us up, and ask for 
agreement or disagreement, there we appreciate 
personalities. These attitudes of the subjects 
turn toward a world of objects, — a world which 
means in real life a world of tools and helps and 
obstacles and ends ; in short, a world of objects 
of appreciation. 

Do those subjects and their objects exist? 
No, they do not exist. I do not mean that they 
are a fairy tale; even the figures of the fairy 
tale are for the instant thought as existing., The 
real world we live in has no existence, because it 
has a form of reality which is endlessly fuller 
and richer than that shadow of reality which 
we mean by existence. Existence of an object 
means that it is a possible object of mere passive 
perception ; in real life, there is no passive per- 
ception, but only active appreciation, and to 
think anything as object of perception only 
means a transmutation by which reality evapo- 
rates. Whatever is thought as existing cannot 
have reality. Our real will does not exist, either 
as a substance which lasts or as a process which is 
going on ; but our will is valid, and has a form 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 25 

of reality which cannot be described because it is 
the last foothold of all description and agree- 
ment. Whoever has not known himself as will- 
ing cannot learn by description what kind of 
reality is given to us in that act of life ; but 
whoever has willed knows that the act means 
something else than the fact that some object of 
passive perception was in consciousness; in 
short, he knows a reality which means more than 
existence. 

The existing world, then, does not lack reality 
because it is merely a shadow of a world beyond 
it, a shadow of a Platonistic world of potentiali- 
ties. No, it is a shadow of a real world, which 
stands not farther from us, but still nearer to us, 
than the existing world. The world we will is 
the reality; the world we perceive is the de- 
duced, and therefore unreal system ; and the 
world of potential forms and relations, as it is 
deduced from this perceivable system, is a con- 
struction of a still higher degree of unreality. 
The potentialities that form the only possible 
metaphysical background of reality are not the 
potentialities of existing objects, but the poten- 
tialities of will acts. This world of not existing 
but valid subjective will relations is the only 
world which history and society, morality and 
philosophy, have to deal with. 

The willing subjects and their mutual rela- 
tions are the only matter history can speak of, 



26 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

but not those subjects thought as perceivable 
existing objects ; no, as willing subjects whose 
reality we can understand, not by describing 
their physical or psychical elements, but by 
interpreting and appreciating their purposes and 
means. The stones, the animals, even the sav- 
ages, have no history ; only where a network of 
individual will relations can be acknowledged 
by our will have we really history ; and our own 
historical position means the system of will atti- 
tudes by which we acknowledge other willing 
subjects. To be sure, history, like every other 
science, must go from the raw material of single 
facts to generalities ; but if we are in a world of 
not existing but valid realities, the generalities 
cannot be laws, but will relations of more and 
more general importance. Existing processes are 
scientifically generalized by laws ; valid relations 
are generalized by more and more embracing 
relations. The aim of the real historian, there- 
fore, is, not to copy the natural laws of physics 
and social psychology, but to work out the more 
and more general inner relations of mankind by 
following up the will influence of great men, till 
finally the philosophy of history shall comprise 
this total development from paradise to the day 
of judgment by one all-embracing will connec- 
tion. Thus history in all its departments, his- 
tory of politics and constitutions, of art and 
science, of language and law, has as its object 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 27 

the system of those human will relations which 
we ourselves as willing subjects acknowledge, 
and which are for us objects of understanding, 
of interpretation, of appreciation, even of criti- 
cism, but not objects of description and expla- 
nation, as they are valid subjective will func- 
tions, not existing perceivable objects. 

History speaks only of those will acts which 
are acknowledged as merely individual. We 
know other will acts in ourselves which we will 
with an over-individual meaning, those attitudes 
we take when we feel ourselves beyond the 
domain of our purely personal wishes. The will 
remains our own, but its significance transcends 
our individual attitudes ; it has an over-individ- 
ual value ; we call it our duty. To be sure, our 
duty is our own central will ; there is no duty 
which comes from the outside. The order which 
comes from outside is force which seduces or 
threatens us ; duty lies only in ourselves ; it is 
our own will, but our will in so far as we are 
creators of an over-individual attitude. 

If the system of our individual will acts is in- 
terpreted and connected in the historical sciences, 
the system of our over-individual will acts is 
interpreted and connected in the normative 
sciences, logic, aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy 
of religion. Logic treats of the over-individual 
will acts of affirming the world, aesthetics of 
those of appreciating the world, religion of 



28 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

those of transcending the world, ethics of those 
of acting for the world ; and in virtue of this 
attitude also are constituted all the side branches 
of ethics, as jurisprudence and pedagogy. All 
treat of over-individual valid will relations, and 
no one has therefore directly to deal with exist- 
ing psychical objects. On the basis of these 
normative sciences the idealistic philosophy has 
to build up its metaphysical system, which may 
connect the disconnected will attitudes of our 
ethical, sesthetical, religious, and logical duties 
in one ideal dome of thoughts. But however 
we may formulate this logically ultimate source 
of all reality, we know at least one thing surely, 
that we have deprived it of all meaning and of 
all values and of all dignity, if we picture it as 
something which exists. The least creature of 
all mortals, acknowledged as a willing subject, 
has more dignity and value than even an al- 
mighty God, if he is thought of merely as a 
gigantic psychological mechanism ; that is, as 
an object the reality of which has the form of 
existence. 

VI 

How do we come, then, to the idea of exist- 
ing objects? There is no difficulty in under- 
standing that. Our life is will, and our will has 
its duties ; but every action turns toward those 
means and obstacles and ends, those objects of 
appreciation, which are material for our will and 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 29 

our duties. Every act is thus a cooperation of 
subjects and subjectively appreciated objects ; 
we cannot fulfill our duty, therefore, if we do 
not know what we have to expect from the 
objects in this cooperation. There must arise, 
then, the will to isolate our expectation about 
the objects ; that is, to think what we should 
have to expect from the objects if they were inde- 
pendent of the willing subjects. In reality, they 
are never independent ; in our thoughts, we can 
cut them loose from the willing subjects, and 
think of them as objects which are not any more 
objects of appreciation, but objects of perception 
only. These objects in their artificial separation 
from the real subject, thought of as objects of a 
passive spectator, take by that change a form 
which we call existence, and it is the aim of nat- 
ural science to study these existing things. The 
path of their study is indicated to them by the 
goal they try to reach. They have to determine 
the expectations the objects bring up ; at first, 
therefore, they look out for those features of the 
objects which suggest the different expectations, 
and natural science calls these features of the 
objects their elements. These elements are not 
really in the objects, but they represent all that 
which determines the possible variations of the 
objects in the future. Thus science considers 
the present thing a combination of elements to 
determine its relation to the future thing ; but 



30 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

the present thing is, then, itself the future of 
the past thing, and it stands, in consequence, 
between past and future ; that is, as a link in a 
chain in which everything is determining the 
future and determined by the past, everything 
cause and everything effect. 

Natural science finds in this attempt that 
there may be two classes of such existing ob- 
jects : objects which are possible, perceivable 
objects for every subject, and others which are 
perceivable only for one subject. Natural sci- 
ence calls the first group physical objects, the 
second group psychical objects, and separates 
the study of them, as this relation to the one or 
the many brings with it numerous characteristic 
differences, the differences between physics and 
psychology. But the point of view for both is 
exactly the same ; both consider their material 
as merely perceivable objects which are made up 
from elements, and which determine one another 
by causal connections. Since they are thought 
as cut loose from the attitude of the will, neither 
the physical nor the psychical objects can have 
values or teleological relations. 

But the will itself ? If psychology, like phy- 
sics, deals with the objects of the world in their 
artificial separation from the will, how can the 
will itself be an object of psychology ? The 
presupposition of this question is in some way 
wrong ; the will is primarily not at all an object 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 31 

of psychology. The real psychological objects 
are the ideas of our perception and memory and 
imagination and reason. Only if psychology 
progresses, it must come to the point where it 
undertakes to consider every factor of our men- 
tal life from a psychological point of view ; that 
is, as an object made up from atomistic elements 
which the psychologist calls sensations. The 
will is not a possible object ; psychology must 
make a substitution, therefore ; it identifies the 
real personality with the psychophysical organ- 
ism, and calls the will the set of conditions ' 
which psychologically and physiologically deter- 
mines the actions of this organism. Now this 
will, too, is made up of sensations, — muscle sen- 
sations and others ; and this will depends upon 
psychological laws, is the effect of conditions 
and the cause of effects ; it is ironed with the 
chains of natural laws to the rock of neces- 
sity. The real will is not a perceivable object, 
and therefore neither cause nor effect, but has 
its meaning and its value in itself ; it is not an 
exception to the world of laws and causes ; no, 
there would not be any meaning in asking whe- 
ther it has a cause or not, as only existing ob- 
jects can belong to the series of causal relations. 
The real will is free, and it is the work of such ' 
free will to picture, for its own purposes, the 
world as an unfree, a causally connected, an 
existing system ; and if it is the triumph of mod- 



32 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

ern psychology to master even the best in man, 
the will, and to dissolve even the will into its 
atomistic sensations and their causal unfree play, 
we are blind if we forget that this transforma- 
tion and construction is itself the work of the 
will which dictates ends, and the finest herald of 
L its freedom. 

Of course, as soon as the psychologist enters 
into the study of the will, he has absolutely to 
abstract from the fact that a complicated substi- 
tution is the presupposition for his work. He 
has now to consider the will as if it were really 
composed of sensational elements, and as if his 
analysis discovered them. The will is for him 
really a complex of sensations ; that is, a com- 
plex of possible elements of perceptive ideas. 
As soon as the psychologist, as such, acknow- 
ledges in the analysis of the will a factor which 
is not a possible element of perception, he de- 
stroys the possibility of psychology just as much 
as the physicist who acknowledges miracles in 
the explanation of the material world denies 
physics. There is nothing more absurd than to 
blame the psychologist because his account of 
the will does not do justice to the whole reality 
of it, and to believe that it is a climax of forci- 
ble arguments against the atomizing psychology 
of to-day if philosophers exclaim that there is 
no real will at all in those compounds of sensa- 
tions which the psychologist substitutes. Cer- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 33 

tainly not, as it was just the presupposition of 
psychology to abstract from that real will. It is 
not wiser than to cast up against the physicist 
that his moving atoms do not represent the phys- 
ical world because they have no color and sound 
and smell. If they sounded and smelled still, 
the physicist would not have fulfilled his pur- 
pose. 

Psychology can mean an end, and can mean 
also a beginning. It may be, and in this cen- 
tury, indeed, has been, the last word of a natu- 
ralistic attitude toward the world, — an atti- 
tude which emphasized only what is expected 
from the objects, and neglected the duties of the 
subjects. But psychology degenerates into an 
unphilosophical psychologism, just as natural sci- 
ence degenerates into materialism, if it does not 
understand that it works only from one side, and 
that the other side, the reality which is not ex- 
istence, and therefore no possible object of psy- 
chology and natural science, is the primary real- 
ity. Psychology may be also a beginning. It 
can mean that we ought to abandon exaggerated 
devotion for the physical world, that we ought 
to look out for our inner world ; a good psycho- 
logy is then the most important supplement to 
those sciences which consider the inner life, not 
as an existing, describable, explainable object, but 
as a will system to be interpreted and to be ap- 
preciated. If that is the attitude, the psycho- 



34 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE 

logical sciences on the one side, the historical 
and normative sciences on the other side, can 
really do justice to the totality of the problems 
of the inner life. If psychology tries to stand 
on both sides, its end must be near ; the real life 
will tear it up and rend it in pieces. If it stands 
with strong feet on the one side, and acknow- 
ledges the right of the other side, it will have a 
future. The psychology of our time too often 
seems determined to die out in psychologism ; 
that must be stopped. Psychology is an end as 
the last word of the naturalistic century which 
lies behind us; it may become a beginning as 
the introductory word of an idealistic century to 
be hoped for. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 



In the opinion of the public the most charac- 
teristic feature of the present psychology is its 
association with physiology ; the questions in re- 
gard to the mind, which in earlier times belonged 
to the domains of the philosopher only, are now 
to be answered by inquiries as to the functions of 
the brain. This new situation has everywhere 
stirred up feelings of hope and feelings of fear ; 
the hope in the hearts of enthusiastic admirers 
of natural science, the fear in the souls of those 
for whom the ethical values of life stand fore- 
most. Each of these two antagonistic feelings 
is based on a popular doctrine, and these two 
doctrines have absolutely nothing in common 
beyond the one fact that both are equally mis- 
taken. 

The hope-inspiring theory of the progressive 
friends of psychology is that brain physiology 
alone can teach us the real constitution of men- 
tal life, as the brain is a perceivable, palpable 
thing which can be dissected and microscopically 
examined, while the soul is a merely hypotheti- 



36 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

cal construction of the metaphysicians. All the 
so-called knowledge of psychical life must thus 
be vague and foggy, and all exact and scientific 
knowledge of it must thus date from the time 
when the ganglion cells and association fibres 
were discovered to be the causes of mental 
action. The fear-suggesting theory of the more 
conservative friends of psychology does not deny 
that many psychical acts are dependent upon 
bodily functions, but while the others welcome 
the fact as an instrument of science, they de- 
spise it as an obstacle to an ethical life. All our 
duties depend upon the freedom of our deci- 
sions, and if it can be shown that our whole 
mental life is determined by the physiological 
processes in our brain, then the claim of free- 
dom is meaningless ; we stand then fully under 
the mechanical laws which move the molecules 
in our body. The necessary and logical conse- 
quence is that it must be a gain for morality to 
show that at least some psychical functions, the 
feelings for instance, or the attention or the 
volitions, may be independent of intermingling 
ganglion cells. The first view thus leads natu- 
rally to the wish to find as many relations be- 
tween mind and brain as possible ; the second 
view must lead to the opposite wish that such 
relations may finally be recognized as incomplete 
and full of exceptions. 

The mistake of the psychophysiological enthu- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 37 

siasts lies more on the surface than that of the 
accusers. We are told that we are to expect 
an exact knowledge of the psychical facts from 
our knowledge of the brain ; but what in the 
world can we know better than the objects of 
our immediate self -observation ? The observa- 
tion and analysis of our mental facts is in no 
way dependent upon a hypothesis in regard to 
the soul ; it is the most direct object of our at- 
tention, and we thus know endlessly more about 
our psychical facts than about the functions of 
the brain. Even two thousand years ago the 
chief mental facts were well known, while the 
most fundamental questions of brain physiology 
are still to-day under lively discussion. Above 
all, the history of science shows how in the times 
of their cooperation psychology always had to 
give and physiology to take ; light had to be 
thrown from the side of the well-known psy- 
chological facts upon the obscure physiological 
facts, and never in the opposite direction. The 
consequence of this situation is that psychologists 
in their work of analysis and research into the 
constitution of the psychical facts have not the 
slightest reason for inquiring into any accom- 
panying brain processes ; they cannot learn from 
that side anything which they do not know bet- 
ter from self-observation and the observation of 
others. Whether a special mental act occurs in 
one part of the brain or in another, whether 



38 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

the cells or the fibres are engaged, whether the 
processes are similar to the physical movements 
in an electric wire or to the physiological actions 
in an amoeboid organism, whether the sensory 
and motor centres are separate or identical, and 
a hundred similar questions which stand in the 
foreground of interest for the doctrine of psy- 
chophysiological relations are all equally indif- 
ferent for the study of the psychical facts as 
such. The increase of scientific exactitude must 
come from the use of more refined methods in 
self-observation, and all the work done in our 
modern laboratories of experimental psychology 
is in the service of this endeavor, while the 
methods of histology and comparative anatomy, 
of pathology and vivisectional physiology, all 
indispensable for the psychophysiological pro- 
blems, are unknown, and ought to remain un- 
known, in our psychological laboratories. The 
hope that physiological psychology will give us 
a fuller acquaintance with the psychological facts 
as such is therefore an illusion. 

But not less misleading is the fear that the 
system of physiological psychology may inter- 
fere with the values of our practical life. It 
stands and falls with the conviction that the psy- 
chical facts which are conceived as dependent 
upon the brain machinery are the real inner 
experience which embraces our duties and re- 
sponsibilities. A philosophical inquiry into the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 39 

relations of psychology to reality cannot leave 
any doubt that such a belief is untenable. In 
our real life our objects of action are not ideas 
which are separated from the physical things, 
but the physical and psychical objects form one 
undifferentiated object of will, which from merely 
secondary logical motives is divided into a physi- 
cal and psychical part, and is then conceived as 
independent of the acts of the subject. And 
these acts themselves are also never given to us 
as contents of consciousness, never as objects, 
but as functions which we feel and live through. 
Objects and subjective acts are thus alike trans- 
formed into something which they never are in 
reality as soon as the objects are conceived as 
severed from the will and differentiated into 
physical and psychical parts and the subjective 
acts are conceived as psychical objects. All this 
psychology must do in the interest of special 
logical purposes of which we shall examine later 
some of the motives and some of the conse- 
quences. But whatever the motives may be, it 
is clear that this construction of psychical ob- 
jects, which precedes all special psychological 
work, excludes from the start the possibility that 
any connection and relation into which these 
psychical facts enter can decide about the rela- 
tions and connections of the real life. 

There is thus no emotional interest involved 
in the question whether a smaller or a larger 



40 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

part of the psychical facts must be conceived as 
the accompaniment of brain functions; the 
problem is merely logical and theoretical, as are 
also the considerations which lead to the ulti- 
mate answer of the question. It is true that 
the naturalists and psychologists themselves are 
mostly inclined, in the eagerness of their special- 
ist^ work, to overlook and to ignore this logical 
basis of the relations, and to be satisfied with a 
merely empirical foundation. The relation be- 
tween mind and brain seems to them a fact of 
observation, a chance fact whose limits must be 
found by careful inquiry of the verifiable occur- 
rences. They are not conscious of the deeper 
spring of this inquiry; they follow their scien- 
tific instinct as discoverers, and do not feel that 
this instinct is controlled by logical demands 
which decide what in the realm of observation 
ought to be acknowledged as fact, and what 
ought to be transformed till it satisfies the theo- 
retical postulates. 

II 

Of course even the layman is familiar with 
plenty of instances in which the empirical facts 
suggest the view that the psychical facts some- 
how depend upon the brain. Popularly best 
known are the abnormal processes. A man be- 
comes blind or deaf if special parts of the brain 
are destroyed by a hemorrhage ; his intelligence 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 41 

becomes disintegrated if he suffers from para- 
lysis of the brain ; the brain state of sleep brings 
with it the psychical wonders of dreams ; a blow 
on the head may induce a state of fainting in 
which all mental life disappears ; and chemical 
substances introduced into the blood circulation 
of the brain change our moods and emotions. 
Such generally known experiences are supple- 
mented by more complicated facts from all quar- 
ters. The mental life of animals shows itself 
to be parallel in its development to the differen- 
tiation of the central nervous system ; the facul- 
ties of human individuals appear to correspond 
to a full development of the brain, the mental 
life of the idiot to belong to a brain of inhibited 
growth. To this class of facts belong all the 
experiments of the physiologist who shows that 
the artificial extirpation of a special centre in 
the hemispheres of the brain destroys the peri- 
pheral function, a function which, on the other 
hand^ can be artificially produced by an electrical 
stimulation of the intact centre. Here belong 
also the observations of comparative anatomy, 
which prove the development of special brain 
parts to be increased or decreased in different 
animal groups according to the higher or lower 
state of special psychical functions ; for instance, 
the high development of the olfactory lobe in 
animals which have a fine sense of smell. The 
most different methods here work together to 



42 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

make the collection of a large number of detailed 
facts possible, and yet the psychologist follows 
a wrong track if he believes that the results 
which are yielded by such methods must be de- 
cisive for his psychophysical convictions. 

If the question were really a merely empirical 
one, we should be obliged to limit the extension 
of the psychophysical parallelism to the few 
psychological processes for which the natural 
sciences have already found the physiological 
substratum, but in that moment all the interest 
of the psychologist w r ould disappear. He ac- 
knowledges, in response to a logical demand, that 
every single psychical fact has its physiological 
counterpart or the whole inquiry becomes a use- 
less and time-wasting luxury. Whether the psy- 
chophysical connections have one exception or 
a million is indifferent ; the belief that the con- 
nection exists without exception is the chain on 
which the whole pyschophysical system hangs, 
and it must fall if the chain is broken, whether 
broken once or a thousand times. If it were 
otherwise — that is, if the psychophysical con- 
nections were merely results of empirical observa- 
tion — they would form an appendix to scientific 
psychology which would be at least unnecessary 
for the real psychological work. Psychology de- 
scribes and explains the psychological facts ; it 
is therefore not its task to study anything which 
lies outside of the field of psychical facts, if 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 43 

such extension to the non-psychical facts is not 
logically necessary for the study of the psychical 
facts themselves. The study of the connections 
between mind and body would then stand as a 
special empirical science between psychology 
and physics, but it would not be a part of psy- 
chology itself. Such, however, is not the case. 
Psychology needs the psychophysical connection 
for its own special work, needs it as a logical sup- 
position without which it cannot fulfill its proper 
task, and it therefore acknowledges the complete- 
ness of the connection independent of the special 
empirical observations. Psychophysical paral- 
lelism brings with it no ethical danger and no 
materialistic consequences, because the connected 
objects do not belong to reality, and are merely 
theoretical constructions for special logical pur- 
poses ; but in these constructed systems the con- 
nection is absolutely complete and exceptionless 
or it is altogether useless for psychology. The 
decoration of our psychological lecture courses 
with pretty physiological bric-a-brac and the 
trimming up of our text-books with physiologi- 
cal wood-cuts can hardly be admitted as an end 
in itself. 

Why does the psychologist transcend the lim- 
its of the psychical world and look over into the 
physical world, which is, as the name indicates, 
never the direct object of his interests? The 
usual answer is that the psychical facts need the 



44 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

physical substratum for their explanation ; but I 
think we can go a long step farther and say that 
even the description of the psychical facts needs 
and constantly presupposes the reference to the 
physical world, and that it is therefore an illusion 
to believe that psychology can fulfill at least the 
first part of its work, the description of its 
material, without transgressing the boundaries 
of consciousness. 

Ill 

Description means the communication of an 
object by the communication of its elements. 
Other ways of communication are open, but 
only that method which analyzes the object into 
elements and fixates the elements for the pur- 
pose of communication is a description. The 
choice of the elements and their fixation also can 
of course reach very different levels. We may 
analyze an animal by separating the chief parts 
which we perceive from the outside, or we may 
tear it in pieces to find out the inner parts also ; 
we may make a careful anatomical dissection 
which separates the different tissues, or we may 
advance to a histological analysis which discrimi- 
nates the different microscopical cells. The de- 
scription thus stands the higher the more our 
choice of elements takes account of the causal 
connections, but even the most popular and un- 
scientific report describes on the basis of an ana- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 45 

lysis. In the same way the fixation of the ele- 
ments to be communicated may be increasingly 
accurate : we may be satisfied to describe the 
color or the form of the parts of the animal by 
using the names of general conceptions which 
include many similar objects, calling it green or 
oval, or we may advance to a determination of 
the number of ether vibrations and make mea- 
surement of the dimensions in thousandths of a 
millimeter : the principle remains the same. 

How far can we describe psychological objects 
in the same way, — an idea, for instance ? A 
corresponding analysis is certainly possible. We 
cannot really isolate the psychical elements, but 
we can certainly separate them in consciousness, 
turning the attention to one element after the 
other, in our self -observation. Here also many 
stages are possible ; the highest stage, corre- 
sponding to the microscopical analysis of the 
anatomist, is reached by self-observation under 
the experimental conditions which our laborato- 
ries furnish, — in other words, the analysis may 
approach more and more nearly those elements 
which are the necessary footholds for the ex- 
planation of the facts ; but in any case there is 
no theoretical objection to the analysis of mental 
facts. Quite different is the second factor of 
the descriptive process, the fixation of these ele- 
ments for the purpose of communication. We 
can say without limitation : a psychical element 



46 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

can never be directly communicated, because 
communication presupposes the possibility of a 
mutual sharing in the object of experience, 
while the psychical objects are from their nature 
strictly individual property. 

If we communicate by other methods than de- 
scription, for instance by suggestion or gestures, 
the other person takes part in our intentions and 
purposes, and these intentions are then the ob- 
ject of the communication. But these intentions 
are not themselves psychical objects; they are the 
ideal points towards which the meaning of our 
ideas is directed, and the intention towards which 
my ideas point may very well be at the same 
time the goal for the attitudes of the other. 
But we ask whether the content of consciousness 
itself can possibly be an object in which the other 
can take part, and this alone we deny. What 
my ideas mean and intend is something in which 
any other may participate, but my ideas them- 
selves belong to me alone, and can, as psychical 
objects, never be the ideas of any one else. 
My consciousness is my castle, and even if a 
mind-reader finds out my most hidden thoughts, 
his claim does not mean that he has caught, a 
glimpse within my castle walls. He does not 
become conscious of my psychical contents, but 
he produces in himself ideas which he claims 
correspond to my ideas; but not the slightest 
sensation can ever belong to his and to my con- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 47 

sciousness together. All this is not a matter of 
chance ; we cannot think of any psychical fact 
for which it could be otherwise. In reality the 
physical thing and our idea of it are one object, 
and as soon as we differentiate it into a physical 
and psychical part we have no other principle of 
division than this one, that we call physical what- 
ever is the possible object of experience for sev- 
eral subjects, and psychical whatever cannot be 
experienced by more than one. All the other 
differences are secondary consequences of this 
fundamental principle, and we have thus no rea- 
son to be surprised that we find the latter true 
without exception. No molecule moves in the 
world which cannot be an object for every one, 
and no sensation arises in a consciousness which 
can be shared with a second subject. 

The difference in the communication of physi- 
cal and psychical objects is now evident. How- 
ever I may analyze the physical thing, each ele- 
ment is an object for me and my neighbor at 
the same time, my object becomes his object 
too, he can see it, touch it, hear it like myself, 
and my communication is thus a demonstration 
which fulfills its logical purpose in the most ideal 
way, and my words have merely the function 
of directing attention to the common property. 
But it is not necessary that the physical object 
should be present to our senses ; the words will 
fulfill their communicating purpose no less if 



48 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

they refer to an object which was experienced in 
earlier time, or if the objects themselves were 
never given ; at least their elements may have 
been shared. Whatever the form of the com- 
munication about the physical world may be, 
this reference to the physical world as the object 
of common experience is always given. If I say 
it rains, the other may never have seen rain, but 
by the conceptions of water, sky, globule, falling 
and so forth I can describe the rain from its ele- 
ments, and each of these factors is understood 
through its relation to the objective world. And 
if even these conceptions were unknown, they 
could finally be described by the mere measure- 
ments in space and time, the knowledge of which 
is presupposed in the acknowledgment of other 
subjects. 

There is no one of those who perceive the 
outer world to whom I cannot describe the rain 
and the snow and the thunder in terms of their 
elements ; but how different if I wish to commu- 
nicate that I am sorry, or glad, or afraid. In 
practical life the words " I am afraid " do not 
appear less descriptive than the words "it rains," 
and yet they have a quite different basis. Not 
the least element in my fear as psychical content 
can be demonstrated and offered for participa- 
tion to* others. Whether they call fear a state 
which I call joy or violet odor no direct descrip- 
tion can decide. However I may analyze it the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 49 

elements of my fear are just as incommunicable 
as is the emotion as a whole. 

But psychical states must be described some- 
how; otherwise the possibility of psychology 
would be excluded. If they are not directly 
communicable we must take refuge in indirect 
methods ; if the psychical facts are never object 
for two, and thus strictly individual, we must 
link them with physical processes which belong 
to all. We understand what we mean by the 
words fear, or shock, or joy, because we have 
learned to use the words for those mental states 
which are connected with special physical occur- 
rences. The physical objects with which we link 
them may be foregoing causes or following ef- 
fects ; in any case we have an outer foothold 
for them. We may call shock the mental state 
which follows a sudden strong stimulus, or the 
mental state which precedes a sudden contrac- 
tion of the muscles ; either way is sufficient to 
separate the one state from others for the pur- 
poses of practical life. But it is clear that this 
method also is not only dependent upon the 
merely empirically founded belief that the same 
causes or effects are connected with the same 
psychical processes, but above all that it is not 
a description, because the constitution and the 
elements of the state are not communicated at 
all. Is there no case in which the logical de- 
mands are better fulfilled ? 



50 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

This is now clearly the fact as regards the 
ideas. The emotions link themselves with physi- 
cal causes or effects, and everything in respect to 
them is dependent upon doubtful observations 
and interpretations ; the ideas, on the other hand, 
stand in a relation to physical things which is 
anchored in philosophical ground and independ- 
ent of chance observation ; the ideas mean 
things, and the physical things and the ideas by 
which we mean them are in reality one and the 
same object. Here we have a logically necessary 
connection which holds firm for the elements as 
well as for the whole. The idea means the thing, 
and any sensation in the idea means a feature of 
the thing. The tone, the smell, the color as sen- 
sation can thus be communicated indirectly by 
reference to the sounding, smelling, luminous 
physical object, and any degree of exactness 
can be reached by the increasingly accurate de- 
scription of the physical side. The ideas have 
thus a perfectly exceptional situation. No other 
mental state can find such logically necessary 
connection with the physical world, as a feeling 
or volition or emotion or judgment finds merely 
empirical connections, and moreover connections 
only in which the whole refers to a whole physi- 
cal thing, but not every element to a special fea- 
ture of the physical object. 

Ideas and their elements alone can thus find a 
logically satisfactory description in psychology ; 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 51 

the description is indirect, but it is at least a 
communication of elements. And yet it is easy 
to understand that under one condition this ideal 
method of description which we find for the ideas 
may be found at our disposal for all the other 
mental states as well. Psychology would then be 
able to offer a complete description of its mate- 
rial. The one condition is this. Let us call the 
elements into which we can analyze our ideas by 
means of self-observation by the name sensations. 
It may then be that all the non-ideational mental 
states also are made up of sensations. An emo- 
tion or volition is never an idea, but their ele- 
ments may be the same, just as the organic and 
inorganic substances in nature are composed of 
the same chemical elements. If an emotion or 
judgment or volition were a complex of sensa- 
tions, that is, a complex of possible elements of 
ideas, then of course we could describe all psy- 
chical facts with the same logical completeness 
and safety, as every element of these subjective 
states would be exactly determined by reference 
to that particle of the physical world which is 
meant by it as soon as it becomes part of an 
idea ; that is, that with which it is identical from 
the standpoint of undifferentiated reality. 

Modern psychology, like every other active 
and productive science, has had no leisure to stop 
and inquire for the logical purposes in the ser- 
vice of which its work is done. The scientist 



52 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

follows his instincts, and these instinctive ener- 
gies carry him, perhaps, more safely to the goal 
than a conscious reflection on his ends and means; 
but the philosopher must recognize these under- 
lying purposes, and must bring all specialistic 
work within this general point of view. If we 
take such attitude toward the work in psychology 
of the last twenty years, we can easily see that 
not the least and not the most unimportant part 
of it has been done in the unconscious service 
of this one end — to make the non-ideational 
states of mind describable. We have seen that 
only one possibility would allow that. They are 
describable in case they can be considered as 
combinations of sensations ; our goal is, there- 
fore, to replace the real emotions, judgments, 
volitions, and so on, by complexes of sensations. 
Complicated transformations are necessary for 
this purpose, and yet the psychologist must work 
in the belief and with the claim that these sen- 
sations are not the result of his transformations, 
but that he has discovered in them the real parts 
of those mental states. 

All the most modern theories which analyze 
the emotions into complexes of bodily sensations, 
and the will into ideational elements, and seek 
sensational substance even in the most subtle 
shades of the mind and in the most fugitive feel- 
ings, have here their hidden spring. This move- 
ment is unlimited; no content of consciousness 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 53 

can resist its impulse. The aim of the psycholo- 
gist is to describe the mental facts ; he must, 
therefore, presuppose that all mental facts are 
describable, and, since only elements of ideas can 
be described, that every content of consciousness 
is in reality a combination of sensations. As 
long as the substitution remains incomplete the 
psychologist feels that he has not discovered the 
true nature of the facts. The belief that we con- 
nect mental with physical processes merely in 
the service of explanation is thus an illusion ; 
the simplest description demands just the same. 

IV 

These claims of description do not mean that 
the demand for explanation does not introduce 
any new features into the system of relations 
between the physical and the psychical worlds. 
We can say even that a connection of a quite 
different character must be acknowledged as 
soon as we try to understand every psychical 
phenomenon from its foregoing causes. This 
new and in many ways higher form of psycho- 
physical connection also can be developed here 
only in general terms. In this case also the 
principle itself may be more or less masked in 
the soul of the psychologist who uses it, and here 
again everything depends upon logical demands 
which do not allow an exception, and not upon 
empirical observation. 



54 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

We may start from the empirical claim that 
all our mental life goes on in our organism ; this 
means at the outset only that my ideas and feel- 
ings are with me now in this town, in this room, 
in this body, probably in this head, but it does 
not include any hypothesis as to the relation of 
mind and body. My mental states are not out- 
side of my epidermis, but they may go on some- 
where, for instance at a special point of my brain, 
absolutely independent of the functions of the 
organism. Of course this empirical starting 
point is itself reached only by a complicated 
remodeling of the reality. Primarily the inner 
experience has no spatial quality at all, and is 
thus neither in a room nor in a brain ; space is a 
form of its objects, not a form of its own reality. 
But this introjection of the mental facts into the 
physical organism may be acknowledged here as 
granted without a discussion of the different 
steps which lead to it. Even when this point is 
reached, however, many possibilities of interpre- 
tation are open ; it is only the goal that lies 
clear before us : we must explain the psychical 
facts. 

The wish to explain the psychical facts is not 
an accidental afterthought resulting from an 
abundance of curiosity; rather it is this wish 
which has created the psychological facts as 
such. In reality our objects are objects for the 
will, that is, values. In striving towards the f ul- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 55 

fillment of the duties which life brings to us we 
have an interest in determining what we have to 
expect from the objects in so far as they are in- 
dependent of our will. We thus separate the 
object from the real active subject for the one 
purpose of determining our justified expectations 
in regard to the changes of the objects. In do- 
ing so we create in thought independent objects, 
which we call physical in so far as they are ob- 
jects for every subject, and psychical in so far 
as they are objects for one subject only. The 
world is thus re-thought as physical and psychi- 
cal phenomena only under the pressure of the 
intention to find out the influence which the ob- 
ject will have on the future, that is, the effects 
which it will produce. In other words, we ac- 
knowledge psychical objects as such merely as 
factors in a system of causes and effects, that is, 
as factors in an explainable system. We cannot 
ask whether the psychical and physical facts are 
explainable or not; the possibility of their expla- 
nation is their only legitimate claim to existence. 
If we wish to take another attitude toward the 
experience, — the attitude of appreciation and 
inner understanding, for instance, — then we 
deal with the inner life as it is given in reality, 
and nothing suggests that transformation which 
creates psychical and physical objects. 

How is the explanation of psychical pheno- 
mena possible ? We consider a phenomenon 



56 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

explained as soon as we can show that it is 
necessarily connected with another existing fact 
which precedes. At the first glance this de- 
mand seems to be satisfied whenever we can 
bring two facts under an empirical law which 
says whenever A occurs B must follow. The 
necessity of the connection between the single 
facts appears then as a logical consequence of 
the general fact which the law reports ; it must 
be so and not otherwise this time because it is al- 
ways so. Psychology and physics therefore seek 
empirical laws. The attraction of the iron is 
explained by the laws of electricity, and the re- 
production of the idea is explained by the laws 
of association. The two sciences seem in this 
respect perfectly parallel, and yet they mean 
something theoretically absolutely different. All 
the laws of the physical universe are in the last 
analysis applications of the laws of mechanics. 
The question is not whether every empirical law 
is already recognized in its mechanical factors, 
but it must be acknowledged that natural science 
has not reached its ideal end till the physical 
world is understood as a world of atoms which 
move according to mechanical laws. All physi- 
cal, chemical, and biological laws are then merely 
applications and combinations of the mechanical 
laws for special complexes of atoms. 

None of the empirical laws are as such neces- 
sary connections for our intellect ; they are con- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 57 

densed experiences, and if the experiences were 
otherwise the laws would be changed. The me- 
chanical axioms, on the other hand, are of a very 
different character ; they are the necessary forms 
of our apperception of the outer world, — the 
forms of connection which make the thinking of 
a connected world of objects possible at all, — 
and the aim to transform all empirical laws ulti- 
mately into mechanical ones is thus the unavoid- 
able consequence of the logical nature of the 
latter. The mechanical laws are therefore the 
real basis of all necessity in the physical connec- 
tions. The physical or chemical or biological 
laws would in themselves not contain anything 
which could convince us that an event must 
happen just so and not otherwise, but as soon 
as we understand them to be complications of 
mechanical laws they are logically indispen- 
sable. All our trust in the necessity of the 
physical laws is thus based finally on the con- 
viction, that if we knew all we should recognize 
every law as a consequence of the mechanical 
axioms which are laws of thought applied to 
the conception of space and time. 

All the axiomatic doctrines about causal con- 
nections in the universe depend upon one law, 
which is the fundamental presupposition for the 
existence of the physical world, the law that 
the causes and effects are quantitatively equal. 
The totality of physical processes can then be 



58 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

expressed in causal equations, and every effect 
can theoretically be determined and exactly cal- 
culated from the causes. As all physical laws 
can thus be reduced to mechanical axioms, which 
are ultimately dependent upon this postulate of 
causal equations, the necessity of the physical 
universe finds here its real foundation ; this ulti- 
mate axiom links all physical processes in the 
world by the chain of necessity, and thus ad- 
mits, theoretically, an absolutely perfect expla- 
nation. 

Nothing of this kind is possible, on the other 
hand, for the empirical laws of the psychical 
world. The laws of association and all the 
other empirical laws, in which modern psycho- 
logy condenses the results of observation, can 
never be transformed into causal equations, and 
therefore never based on a foundation of neces- 
sity. They can never make us understand that 
with a special preceding cause absolutely this 
special effect must result. Why is it so ? 
Why is all that gives its ultimate meaning and 
strength to physical law definitively denied to 
the psychical laws ? It is not a matter of 
chance ; no, it is the result of the fundamental 
act by which the subject divides the real object 
into a physical and a psychical thing, meaning 
by physical all that is a possible object for every 
subject, by psychical all that is a possible object 
for one subject only. This definition makes it 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 59 

logically necessary that the physical object shall 
not disappear and shall not be newly created, 
but must be equal in all changes, while the psy- 
chical object, which cannot be the object of two 
subjective acts, must therefore be created and 
disappear in every new act. One psychical ob- 
ject can then not contain another, and can hence 
not be considered as its multiple. It cannot be 
understood, therefore, as a measurable quantity, 
and is thus eternally unfit for a causal equation, 
and therefore for a connection by necessity. 

The claim that psychological facts as such can 
never be directly connected by necessity may be 
misunderstood as meaning that the acts which 
form our inner life have no inner connection. 
The opposite is true. Our inner life in its real 
activity is bound together in all its acts, but it is 
an inner connection, not an outer one, as it refers 
to the will, while objects can have no other con- 
nection than a causal one. The real acts of our 
life bind each other teleologically by their inten- 
tions and meanings, but as soon as we transform 
the acts into psychical objects this inner connec- 
tion loses all its meaning. Our acknowledgment 
of premises binds us in acknowledging the con- 
clusions, but this connection of judgments is 
only logically, that is, teleologically, necessary ; 
psychologically the judgments as psychical con- 
tents can connect themselves with a wrong con- 
clusion just as well as with the logical one. 



60 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

The connection of our real inner life is not a 
causal one, while psychological facts as such, that 
is, as objects, find causal connection or are not 
connected at all. We have seen that they can- 
not necessarily be connected in a direct way, 
because they cannot enter into a causal equation. 
To concede that they ought then not to be ex- 
plained at all is still less possible, as we have 
seen that we conceive mental life as a series of 
psychical objects merely for the purpose of link- 
ing it causally. It follows that we must then 
take the way which we were forced to choose in 
the interest of description ; that is, we must try 
to do indirectly what is impossible by direct 
methods, we must connect the unexplainable 
psychical world with the explainable physical 
world. If the idea of the physical world in- 
cludes the postulate that every physical process 
can be understood as the necessary result of the 
foregoing process, and if we are able to show 
for every psychical process that it is connected 
with a physical one, we can consider the psychi- 
cal facts themselves as causally connected when- 
ever the corresponding physical processes are 
causally linked. 

V 

The purpose of this connection would be 
fulfilled by any material that shows a logically 
constant relation. In the discussion of the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 61 

principles of description we have seen that only 
one connection between psychical and physical 
facts — that between perception and perceived 
object — has logical necessity, because this con- 
nection can be deduced from primary identity. 
It is evident that this relation cannot be used, at 
1 least in this direct form, for the purposes of ex- 
planation. By description we aim at making the 
described mental state a kind of public property ; 
every one who understands the description finds 
the idea which suits the description in his own 
mind; and we must therefore link it with a part 
of the physical world, which is practically at the 
disposal of every one. The explanation, on the 
other hand, does not seek to formulate a propo- 
sition about the mental states of other subjects ; 
it strives to set forth the one mental fact which 
actually appears in me or in you. It must thus 
refer to a part of the physical world which be- 
longs to the individual, that is, to our body. 
Our body is, of course, also like every physical 
thing, an object of perception for all, and just 
for that reason it is possible to take the processes 
in the body on which the explanation is based as 
material for description and communication ; but 
in a more essential sense my body is an indi- 
vidual object, as it is the one object whose local 
and temporal relations to other objects determine 
my individual view of the world. If we describe 
an idea the reference to such a practically indi- 



62 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

vidual object would be unsatisfactory, as it must 
be linked with the corresponding idea in every 
one to be a real description. If we explain an 
idea the reference to a practically common object 
would be useless, as we are seeking to explain 
a strictly individual fact, the psychical object 
which I have in this special moment. In the 
description of the idea of the moon I refer to 
the moon itself, claiming that wherever the 
physical moon exists there is given the material 
from which can be learned what idea I mean. 
But if I wish to explain why I now have the 
perception of the moon it would not do to refer 
again merely to the existence of the moon, since 
the fact that the moon exists certainly does not 
logically imply that every one at present has the 
perception of the moon in consciousness. It is 
logically necessary that whenever, for the pur- 
pose of explanation, psychical facts are linked 
with physical ones the physical processes must 
be processes in the individual bodies. We can 
even add that it must be a process in the body 
which cannot be an object for our neighbors in 
the same way as for ourselves. A process of my 
peripheral organs would thus be as unsatisfac- 
tory a means of explanation as the existence of 
the moon. The fact that something happens to 
my hand, for instance, cannot serve as explana- 
tion for the appearance of a special mental state, 
for then my neighbor, who can perceive my hand 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 63 

as I do, would necessarily have the same feeling 
if that hand process and the feeling were two 
objects which really belonged together. A cen- 
tral part of the body, which cannot be the object 
of sense perception while it is part of my body, 
is alone in question. This is the reason that 
all the peripheral parts of the body can be and 
always are material for our descriptions, for in- 
stance in the reference to muscles, joints, glands, 
and so on, while the brain, which is not an 
object of perception, can never be used for the 
description. Exactly the opposite is necessarily 
true of the explanation. 

We thus need for explanation a process in the 
physical individual body which is not a possible 
object of perception while we have the psychical 
experience, and for which can be found a uni- 
vocal and necessary connection with the psychi- 
cal object. This condition is realized for the 
perceptive idea and that brain process which 
stands in causally necessary dependence upon 
the perceived object. The relation between the 
perceptive idea, on the one side, and the brain 
process which is produced by the perceived ob- 
ject on the other side, fulfills those necessary 
conditions in ideal completeness, inasmuch as the 
connection between the idea and its object is 
based on epistemological identity and the rela- 
tion between the object and its effect on the 
individual brain is necessary from physical caus- 



64 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

ality. The brain stimulation which is caused 
by the moon is then not conceived as a cause 
for the perception of the moon any more than 
the perceived object itself was conceived as the 
cause. The moon is the cause of the brain 
action, but not of the idea. The material moon 
belongs to the perception of it primarily, not as 
a cause, but as the counterpart which is in epis- 
temological reality identical with the perceptive 
idea ; and it is merely this logical relation that 
is kept up when the physiological effect of the 
moon in our brain is substituted for the moon 
itself. This brain excitement, also, is then in 
no way the cause of the idea and the idea in 
no way the effect of the brain action ; even the 
usual metaphors which say that it is the inside 
of the brain process, or that it is parallel to the 
brain process, or that they belong together as 
do a concave and a convex surface, are merely 
practically useful expressions for a relation of a 
strictly logical character which is derived from 
epistemological identity. The psychophysical 
parallelism of brain function and idea does not, 
therefore, seek at all to explain the idea by the 
physiological process, or vice versa, but merely 
to state that they necessarily belong together, 
and thus to admit the further consequence that 
whenever the physical process is causally pro- 
duced the parallel psychical idea must be 
conceived as existing. Causality thus connects 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 65 

only the physical objects directly, while the psy- 
chical ideas are indirectly linked as accompani- 
ments of the physiological processes. We have 
seen that such a physical causal connection is 
in principle a connection of absolute necessity, 
not comparable with the combination suggested 
by an observed regularity. So far, then, as 
the ideas can be understood as counterparts of 
physiological processes which are causally con- 
nected, this convincing necessity binds them, 
while as merely psychical facts they were dis- 
connected members. 

If it were our goal to extend this method of 
indirect causal binding to the whole content of 
consciousness, three conditions would have to be 
fulfilled. First, the psychophysical parallelism 
which expresses the relation of the brain process 
to the idea would have to be acknowledged for 
the parts of the idea also ; every element of the 
idea would have to correspond to a special part 
of the physiological process which the idea as a 
whole accompanies. Secondly, every content of 
consciousness must be capable of analysis into 
possible elements of ideas, that is, into sensa- 
tions; and thirdly, the physiological processes, 
which are conceived as accompaniments of all 
contents of consciousness, must be capable of 
being linked by physical causality, either among 
themselves or with the events of the universe 
outside of the brain. Of these three conditions 



66 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

we have seen the second one to be fulfilled in so 
far as we acknowledge the mental life to be de- 
scribable. The transformation of the inner life 
into sensations was the only way to describe it, 
and as the possibility of description is granted as 
a presupposition of psychology, therefore we have 
a right to presuppose that all mental states are 
complexes of sensations, however far we may be 
at present from a full knowledge of all the ele- 
ments which compose it. The fulfillment of the 
first and third conditions can, of course, be given 
merely by the work of the physiologist ; the 
psychologist can hardly add anything. The 
physiologist, on the other hand, cannot find any 
insurmountable difficulty in striving towards a 
demonstration of their possibility. The over- 
whelming manifoldness of the histological ele- 
ments of the central nervous system and the 
complication of its structure, the difficulty of 
observing its functions in a direct way, and 
many other peculiar factors open an almost un- 
limited field to the interpretation of the physio- 
logist; there is no reason why he could not select 
as truth merely those facts which point towards 
the fulfillment of the two mentioned conditions, 
and why he could not supplement these facts by 
constructions which make up a system in which 
these logical presuppositions for the explicability 
of the psychical facts are fulfilled. Exactly this 
and nothing else the modern brain physiologist 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 67 

is attempting, and, like all other scientists, he 
must presuppose that the goal at which he is 
aiming can be reached. He thus takes for 
granted that every sensation is accompanied by 
a special brain process, and that all brain pro- 
cesses can be explained through physical cau- 
sality. 

Under these circumstances the totality of our 
mental life can be conceived as linked indirectly 
by real necessity, but it is not less clear that under 
these circumstances our interest as psychologists 
is directed merely to the general theory of psycho- 
physical parallelism and not to the special facts 
of the psychophysical connections. We must 
acknowledge that every mental fact is the accom- 
paniment of a special brain process, and this abso- 
lutely without any possible exception, because 
under this condition alone is it possible to con- 
ceive the psychical objects as causally connected, 
and it was for the purpose of causal interpreta- 
tion only that the transformation of the inner 
experience into psychical objects was made. But 
we cannot have as psychologists any interest in 
the question of the special brain process which 
accompanies a special given psychical phenome- 
non ; that is physiology, and psychology has 
nothing to learn from it. We take for granted 
that such a connection exists, indeed our whole 
explanatory psychology would collapse if we 
allowed the slightest exception; but we do not 



68 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

learn anything about the psychical facts them- 
selves when we hear that the process takes place 
in the cortex or in the subcortical centres, in the 
ganglion cell or in the dendrite, or in the front 
part or in the side part of the brain. Moreover, 
it is now clear why the conviction of the psy- 
chologist, that every mental state has its physio- 
logical accompaniment, is fully independent of 
the special discoveries of physiology and patho- 
logy ; it is not the result of observations, but of 
postulates which are logically unavoidable if we 
are to have psychology at all. 

VI 

There remains, of course, the possibility of the 
objection that the empirical facts do not allow a 
construction which satisfies such psychophysical 
postulates, and that therefore the hypothetically 
demanded psychology is an end which can never 
be reached, and thus an impossible science. If 
such view is correct, if a consistent descriptive 
and causally explaining psychology cannot be 
realized, it is evident whither the inheritance 
must go. If the mental life cannot be explained 
causally, — and that means psychophysical^, — 
then the whole inner experience must be given 
over to the subjectifying sciences, which inter- 
pret it by its meaning and by its values, taking 
the inner life as a unity and as a will act, which 
it certainly is in reality. The objections to ex- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 69 

plaining psychology from this side are essen- 
tially two. On the one side, it is said that 
the physiological system, which alone carries the 
responsibility for all psychological connections, 
can never explain the intellectual and teleological 
character of our connections in consciousness. 
On the other hand, it is emphasized that the struc- 
ture and the connections of the brain are totally 
inadequate to satisfy the other demand that a 
special brain process shall correspond to every 
possible variation of the psychical experience. 
These two objections must now engage our at- 
tention. 

It is quite true that the first claim seems an- 
tagonistic to all the instinctive feelings of a 
popular philosophy. The psychophysical paral- 
lelism which we have deduced as a necessary 
logical postulate if psychology is to exist at all, 
demands indeed not less than the determination 
of all our psychophysical functions by the dispo- 
sitions and causal connections of processes in 
physical matter. Whatever we think, feel, will, 
and act can, as psychophysical process, be exactly 
determined by the totality of active and latent 
causes in the physical system. This seems to de- 
prive our inner life of all its values, and, as we 
are accustomed to connect every appreciation in 
life with inner experience, it seems deplorable 
to conceive this inner lif e as dependent upon the 
blind movements of f eelingless matter. But we 



70 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

have emphasized from the beginning that here 
every emotional interference means confusion. 
Values and duties, freedom and responsibility, 
belong to the inner life in its real activity, but 
not to the system of psychological facts into 
which we have transformed the inner experience. 
As soon as the remoulding of the reality into 
physical and psychical objects is completed the 
latter do not stand nearer to the attitudes of the 
real personality than do the former. Whether 
a result is produced by the causal mechanism of a 
physical substance, or by the causal actions of 
a mental stuff, is not different from the point 
of view of dignity ; both schemes are equally far 
from the teleological actions of the real subject. 
The question is thus merely whether the state of 
science makes it appear possible to explain the 
totality of psychophysical functions, even the 
wisest word and the best deed, as the necessary 
product of physiological processes. 

The problem is a biological one, and the biolo- 
gist need not wait for the philosopher with his 
epistemological postulates deduced from the ne- 
cessary limitations of psychology. The biologist 
finds a direct impulse to such considerations in- 
dependent of all psychological questions in the 
fundamental principle of physics, the law of the 
conservation of energy. He is, of course, mis- 
taken in believing that it is based less on philo- 
sophical reasons than on empirical observation, 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 71 

but it is in any case a non-psychological principle 
which leads to the same result as the psychologi- 
cal discussions: every action, every expression, 
every function which seems to refer to psychical 
experience must find the totality of its causes on 
the physical side, since every exception would be 
a physical miracle. The slightest physical action 
which is not completely determined by the fore- 
going physical causes would represent an increase 
of the sum of energy, a concession by which the 
whole system of physical science would be hope- 
lessly undermined, and which must be uncom- 
promisingly denied, even at the present stage of 
science, which is certainly still far from demon- 
strating the constancy of the sum of energies in 
all variations. Thus the difference between the 
two possible ways of the biologist is merely this : 
When he starts from the physical laws he seeks 
to explain human actions, and this demand for 
physical explanation of the motor discharges 
leads him to the conviction that the psychical 
states also are, from his standpoint, merely accom- 
paniments of physiological processes. When he 
starts from the psychical facts and their unfitness 
for causal interdependence, he aims directly at 
finding a physiological accompaniment to every 
psychical fact, and thence comes to the conclu- 
sion that the motor discharges can be explained 
through these accompanying brain excitements ; 
the final outcome, however, is in both cases the 
same. 



72 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

Does the biologist ever feel discouraged in 
such studies by the valuable character of the 
processes, by that factor which seems to naive 
eclecticism not only the moral hindrance, but 
also the chief theoretical difficulty? Does it 
retard his explanations when the result of the 
brain functions shows logical and practical 
adjustment to the outer conditions and to the 
interests of the acting organism, just as if a 
deliberating intelligence had opened and closed 
the right switches and tracks in the cerebral 
system ? Decidedly not ; more than that, we 
may say that this wisdom and usefulness is for 
him the key to the whole situation. 

The biologist naturally compares the postu- 
lated functions of the brain with the actions of 
the other organs in the organism and finds every- 
where the same adaptation and the same select- 
iveness without ever taking refuge in the too easy 
hypothesis that an intellectual subject stands 
behind the stage and pulls the wires. Such a 
soul hypothesis is no doubt convenient, but it 
leaves all the problems unsolved, and would be 
in itself a still more complicated system to ex- 
plain. After a hearty meal millions and millions 
of cells are working in our vegetative system 
which cooperate in the interest of the nutrition 
of the organism with a wisdom no council of 
chemists could surpass ; yet the physiologist 
would think it a cheap hypothesis to suppose 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 73 

that a stomach-soul controls these useful and 
adapted actions. The same thing is true of the 
apparatus of blood circulation, of breathing, of 
procreation, and so on. But everywhere the 
biologist takes this usefulness not as increasing 
the difficulty of his explanations, but as the bridge 
towards a causal understanding; the modern 
biologist would feel himself lost only on finding 
a useless or disadvantageous organ which could 
not be understood as an abnormal individual dis- 
turbance, or as the remainder of a formerly useful 
organ. The useful organ alone can have found 
the conditions for its development in the growth 
of the race. The digestive apparatus of man 
with its fairy-tale-like complication can be fol- 
lowed in this phylogenetic development from 
the highest mammals down to the protozoons, 
where the assimilation of nourishing substance 
is the function of the whole protoplasmic sub- 
stance. With the growing differentiation of the 
organism only those variations of the vegetative 
apparatus were not eliminated which served the 
purposes of the organism and its descendants ; 
every useless formation was destroyed in the 
struggle for existence, and thus lost its chance 
of being inherited. It is thus just the useful 
complications which become explicable on me- 
chanical principles to the biologist of the Dar- 
winian age. 



74 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

VII 

Why not apply this same view to the functions 
of the brain? One thing is of course evident 
from the first : the biologist must consider not 
merely a part of the apparatus, but the whole, as 
only the whole can be useful. No biology can 
explain the development of the heart without 
the peripheral blood vessels, or the liver without 
the stomach ; the brain alone is not the whole, 
it is the central part, as is the heart in the 
blood system. The brain is useful merely as 
the central organ of a system which begins 
with the sense organs, connects them by a hun- 
dred thousand sensory nerves with the central 
nervous system, and connects this central part, by 
means of the motor nerves, with the muscles of 
the organism. The psychophysical functions 
without muscles to express them, or the centrally 
controlled motor system without sense-organs to 
adjust the functions to the outer world, would be 
biologically useless. This whole arc, from the 
sense organs through the brain to the muscles, is 
on the other hand an apparatus not more and 
not less useful than the circulatory or respiratory 
apparatus; they all represent a perfect adapta- 
tion of the organism to the outer world. 

If this arc is looked on as one apparatus, we 
have indeed no difficulty in following the phylo- 
genetic development downward to the lowest 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 75 

forms in which the functions of this arc were 
secured by the protoplasmatic activity of the 
whole organism. Among the protozoons we find 
two types of reaction to outer stimuli : the con- 
traction of the whole body under disadvantageous 
stimulation and the pseudopodic extension under 
favorable stimulation. Both reactions are most 
useful characteristics, since contraction brings 
the smallest possible surface in contact with the 
dangerous substance, while extension offers the 
largest possible surface to the beneficial sur- 
roundings. It states the problem wrongly to 
ask how the lowest animals came to this acquisi- 
tion : it is just by virtue of this variation that 
the protoplasmic substance becomes an animal. 
As soon as organisms with the power of such 
reaction exist, the differentiation of the under- 
lying substratum of this function is a necessary 
accompaniment to the increasing complication 
and growth of the animals. Firstly, the animal 
cannot reach its prey and cannot protect itself 
against its dangers if v at the higher stages of 
development the whole body still goes through 
the reactions. The stimulation and the motor 
response must become more and more localized 
and the transformation of excitement into dis- 
charge must thus find isolated paths ; we call 
them nerves. But the protective function of 
this apparatus still remains too limited for a 
higher stage if the reaction answers merely the 



76 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

outer stimuli of the moment. It needs thus 
secondly the development of an organ by which 
the reaction can become the discharge of all the 
foregoing stimuli together, an organ in which 
the after effects of earlier impressions remain as 
molecular dispositions which have a reenforcing 
or varying or inhibitory influence on the dis- 
charges of the new impressions. Such an organ 
must develop its possibilities steadily in the phy- 
logenetic development as it adjusts the move- 
ments of the organism to a circle of conditions 
which is the wider the more this apparatus is 
differentiated ; we call it the central nervous 
system. Its biological functions are those which 
we refer in psychological interpretation to mem- 
ory, attention, volition, and so forth. In prin- 
ciple it is nothing new ; the bug, the frog, 
the dog, adjust their useful and protective reac- 
tions merely to an increasingly large set of 
stimuli, spread over space and time, while the 
central nervous system of even the mammal does 
not produce any movement which better adjusts 
the organism of its owner to its surrounding 
than does the protoplastic substance of the in- 
fusoria. 

Nothing new is brought by the step forwards 
from animal to man ; it is the steady development 
of a biological mechanism which does not change 
its functions in spite of new and characteristic 
complications. The life of man brings two fac- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 77 

tors into the evolution which were not unknown 
but insignificant in lower stages of the living 
world : the tool and the division of labor. Su- 
perficial biologists sometimes believe themselves 
to be true Darwinians only when they predict 
for man a development towards an over-man 
with a still more developed body, and they even 
go so far as to construct an ethics which shall 
serve such biological progress. That the biolo- 
gical development cannot suddenly stop is of 
course true. A higher organism is indeed to 
succeed the lower one in the human race too, 
but the development has reached with man a 
form in which progress does not mean simply dif- 
ferentiation of the body. The tools of technique 
and the means of communication through which 
division of labor is possible, in short, the products 
of civilization, are the new organs of man, and 
their development in the struggle for existence 
continues in a direct biological line the progress 
of the animals. The only biologically possible 
over-man is the man with higher civilization, and 
it would correspond to zoological laws that he is 
not more highly developed in his bodily appara- 
tus ; the latter may even be reduced, since the 
man does not need strong legs if he has locomo- 
tives, nor strong fists if he has cannons, nor 
strong eyes if he has microscopes, nor a strong 
memory if he has libraries. 

The tool in its widest sense was indeed the 



78 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

greatest step forwards, as it means an extension 
of the physiological arc at both its ends, char- 
acterized by the entirely new attribute that it 
is detachable and thus not destroyed in the 
death of the organism by which it is produced. 
The individual can attach to his arc apparatus 
the products of all preceding generations, and 
thus readjust his purposes with an incomparable 
richness of means. And in the same direction 
works the division of labor, the other great 
biological scheme which nature has tried with 
man. The functions of the individual sense- 
organ-brain-muscle arc are for the complicated 
man not sufficient to bring to his brain all the 
stimulations which need motor adjustment or to 
produce, even with the tools of civilization, all 
the reactions which would be nutritious, protec- 
tive, and creative. If one acts for the advantage 
of others, and they repay it by acting for his 
benefit, a mutual adjustment can be reached by 
which a much larger amount of advantageous 
motor reaction and sensory stimulation can be 
secured for the individual. The necessary sup- 
position is the development of the means of 
communication from the simplest language to 
the cable and the printing press and the coin, 
and the result is the market and the state. 

And yet this civilized man with his warships 
and newspapers and universities is not better 
adapted to his conditions of life than the micro- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 79 

scopical rhizopod to its simpler conditions; in 
both cases nature has produced that development 
of the reaction apparatus which is in its function- 
ing useful to the organism, and its very useful- 
ness gives us a foothold for explanation. We 
naturally think here of one side of human life 
which seems so fully to contradict such a biolo- 
gical construction that the whole theory appar- 
ently loses its value. Man is an ethical being, 
and our morality finds its value just in the fact 
that we act without reference to our personal 
advantage. Nature cannot produce according 
to biological laws an apparatus which possesses 
normally functions which are useful to other 
individuals but disadvantageous to the acting 
organism. Actions in the interest of the off- 
spring form an exception which explains itself 
and confirms the rule, but the moral action 
seems indeed inexplicable as long as every action 
is explained as a biologically necessary reaction 
of the organism. But we must separate the 
motives of the ethical action from the action 
itself ; the anticipated idea may be to the advan- 
tage of the neighbor only, and yet the action 
may have effects which are indirectly advanta- 
geous to the actor. In our ethical functions we 
perform reactions which we do not need for 
ourselves, but just that we are doing all the 
time in our economical functions also ; the shoe- 
maker makes many more shoes than are necessary 



80 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

to protect his foot. In our economical functions 
we hope and wait for the exchange, in our 
ethical functions we do not wait for it, but the 
exchange comes nevertheless, and only because 
it comes in the long run could nature afford to 
create this kind of reaction apparatus. To re- 
ceive all the great advantages which we enjoy 
when others are good and helpful and generous 
to us, there is only one way — we must be 
generous and good and helpful ourselves. If it 
were otherwise nature would have abolished the 
luxury of variations in such moral directions. 
We praise the sacrifice of life as the highest 
ethical action, and it is indeed clear that here, at 
least, no exchange is possible, after the action, if 
we do not admit fame as a substitute. But here 
ethical appreciation, which considers the motive 
only and not the effects, does not bind biology. 
From a biological standpoint the ethical sacrifice 
of life is not a proof against the principle that 
every psychophysical action is useful to the actor ; 
it is merely a case of overfunctioning. We 
have no useful organ in our body which cannot 
kill us when we overwork it ; if we run too fast 
our heart may kill us. Whenever the useful 
ethical apparatus functions with an abnormal 
intensity, life is lost, but that this intensity is 
really abnormal follows simply from the fact 
that if the voluntary sacrifice of life were a 
normal function there would be no next genera- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 81 

tion to learn and to imitate that prescription. 
In short, the biologist finds no difficulty in bring- 
ing the totality of the psychophysical functions 
under the biological and therefore ultimately 
under the mechanical aspect ; that postulate of 
psychology is in this respect thus realizable. 
That such biological construction does not touch 
at all the problems of the real life and of ethics 
is a matter of course. 

VIII 

It may then be granted that the usefulness 
and adaptedness of the psychophysical functions 
would not contradict the mere mechanical char- 
acter of the substratum upon whose causal func- 
tions we must think the psychical connections 
dependent. But we had a second chief objec- 
tion before us. The structure of the brain seems 
far too uniform to furnish a sufficient manif old- 
ness of functions if we really demand a physio- 
logical process corresponding to every possible 
variation of the content of consciousness. The 
mere number of elements cannot be decisive ; 
if they are all functionally coordinated they can 
offer merely the basis for coordinated psychical 
functions. If we have psychical functions of 
different orders, it would not help us even if we 
had some millions more of the uniform elements. 
It would be useless to deny that here indeed exists 
a great difficulty for our present psychology ; the 



82 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

only question is whether this difficulty really 
opposes the demands and suppositions of psy- 
chology or whether it means that the usual the- 
ories of to-day are inadequate and must be im- 
proved. It seems to me that the latter is the 
case, and that hypotheses can be constructed 
by which all demands of psychology can be satis- 
fied without the usual sacrifice of consistency. 
The situation is the following : — 

The whole scheme of the physiologists operates 
to-day in a manif oldness of two dimensions : they 
conceive the conscious phenomena as dependent 
upon brain excitements which can vary firstly 
with regard to their localities and secondly with 
regard to their quantitative amount. These two 
variations then correspond to the quality of the 
mental element and to its intensity. In the 
acoustical centre, for instance, the different pitch 
of the tone sensations corresponds to locally 
different ganglion cells, the different intensities 
of the same tone sensation to the quantity of the 
excitement. Association fibres whose functions 
are not directly accompanied by conscious experi- 
ences connect these millions of psychophysical 
elementary centres in a way which is imagined 
on the model of the peripheral nerve. No seri- 
ous attempt has been made to transcend this sim- 
ple scheme. Certainly recent discussions have 
brought many propositions to replace the simple 
physiological association fibre which connects the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 83 

psychophysical centres by more complicated sys- 
tems, — theories, for instance, in regard to the 
opening and closing of the connecting paths or 
in regard to special association centres or special 
mediating cell groups, — but these and others 
stick to the old principle that the final psycho- 
physical process corresponds to the strength and 
locality of a sensory stimulation or of its equiva- 
lent reproduction, whatever may have brought 
about and combined the excitements. 

It is true that it has been sometimes suggested 
that the same ganglion cell may also go over into 
qualitatively different states of excitement, and 
thus allow an unlimited manifoldness of new 
psychophysical variations. But it is clear that 
to accept such an hypothesis means to give up 
all the advantages of brain localization. The 
complicatedness of the cell would be in itself 
sufficient to give ground to the idea that its 
molecules may reach some millions of different 
local combinations ; and if every new combina- 
tion corresponds to a sensation, all the tones and 
colors and smells and many other things may go 
on in one cell. But then it is of course our duty 
to explain those connections and successions of 
different states in one cell, and that would lead 
to conceiving the cell itself as constructed with 
millions of paths just like a miniature brain ; in 
short, all the difficulties would be transplanted 
into the unknown structure of the cell. If we, 



84 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

on the other hand, do not enter into such spec- 
ulations, the acceptance of qualitative changes 
in the cell would bring us to the same point 
as if we were satisfied to speak of qualitative 
changes of the brain in general. It would not 
solve the problem but merely ignore it, and 
therefore such an additional hypothesis cannot 
have weight. 

The only theory which brings in a really new 
factor is the theory of innervation feelings. 
This well-known theory claims that one special 
group of conscious facts, namely, the feelings of 
effort and impulse, are not sensations and there- 
fore not parallel to the sensory excitements, but are 
activities of the consciousness and parallel to the 
physiological innervation of a central motor path. 
At this point of course comes in at once the 
opposition of the philosophical claim that every 
psychical fact must be, as we have seen, a con- 
tent of consciousness, and made up of sensations,- 
that is, of possible elements of ideas, to become 
describable and explainable at all. The so-called 
active consciousness, the philosopher must hold, 
has nothing to do with an activity of the con- 
sciousness itself, as consciousness means from 
the psychological standpoint only the kind of 
existence of psychical objects. It cannot do 
anything, it cannot have different degrees and 
functions, it only becomes conscious of its con- 
tents, and all variations are variations of the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 85 

content, which must be analyzed without remain- 
der into elements which are theoretically coordi- 
nated with the elements of ideas, that is, with the 
sensations, while consciousness is only the general 
condition for their existence. But also the em- 
pirical analysis and experiment of the practical 
psychologist are in this case in the greatest har- 
mony with such philosophical claims and opposed 
to the innervation theory. The psychologist 
can show empirically that this so-called feeling 
of effort is merely a group of sensations like 
other sensations, reproduced joint and muscle 
sensations which precede the action and have 
the role of representing the impulse merely on 
account of the fact that their anticipation makes 
inhibitory associations still possible. It would 
thus from this point of view also be illogical 
to think the psychophysical basis of these sen- 
sations different in principle from that of other 
sensations. If the other sensations are accom- 
paniments of sensory excitements in the brain, 
the feelings of impulse cannot claim an excep- 
tional position. 

But are quality and intensity really the only 
differences between the given sensations ? Can 
the whole manifoldness of the content of con- 
sciousness really be determined by variations in 
these two directions only ? Certainly not ; the 
sensations can vary even when quality and inten- 
sity remain constant. As an illustration we may 



86 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

think, for instance, of one variation which is 
clearly not to be compared with a change in kind 
and strength of the sensation ; namely, the varia- 
tion of vividness. Vividness is not identical 
with intensity ; the vivid impression of a weak 
sound and the faint impression of a strong 
sound are in no way interchangeable. If the 
ticking of the clock in my room becomes less and 
less vivid for me the more I become absorbed 
in my work, till it finally disappears, it cannot 
be compared with the experience which results 
when the clock to which I give my full attention 
is carried farther and farther away. The white 
impression, when it loses vividness, does not 
become gray and finally black, nor the large size 
small, nor the hot lukewarm. Vividness is a 
third dimension in the system of psychical ele- 
ments, and the psychologist who postulates com- 
plete parallelism has the right to demand that 
the physiologist show the corresponding process. 
There are other sides of the sensation for which 
the same is true ; they share with vividness the 
more subjective character of the variation, as, 
for instance, the feeling tone of the sensation or 
its pastness and presentness. Other variations 
bring such subjective factors into the complexes 
of sensations without a possibility of understand- 
ing them from the combination of different kinds 
only ; for instance, the subjective shade of ideas 
we believe or the abstractedness of ideas in 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 87 

logical thoughts. In short, the sensations and 
their combinations show besides kind, strength, 
and vividness still other variations which may 
best be called the values of the sensations and 
of their complexes. In the interest of simplicity 
we intentionally neglected these subjective sides 
of the sensations when we discussed the methods 
of description ; it is evident that, in connecting 
the sensation with the physical world for the pur- 
poses of description these sides require reference 
to the physical relation between the perceived 
object and the organism. Is the typical theory 
of modern physiological psychology, which, as we 
have seen, operates merely with the local differ- 
ences of the cells and the quantitative differences 
of their excitement, ever able to find physiologi- 
cal variations which correspond to the vividness 
and to the values of the sensations ? 

An examination without prejudice must neces- 
sarily deny this question. Here lies the deeper 
spring for the latent opposition which the psycho- 
physiological claims find in modern psychology. 
Here are facts, the opponents say, which find no 
physiological counterpart, and we must therefore 
acknowledge the existence of psychological pro- 
cesses which have nothing to do with the physio- 
logical machinery. The vividness, for instance, 
is fully explained if we accept the view that the 
brain determines the kind and strength of the 
sensation, while a physiologically independent 



88 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

subject turns the attention more or less to the 
sensation. The more this attention acts the more 
vivid the sensation ; in a similar way the subjec- 
tive acts would determine the feeling tone of 
the sensation by selection or rejection, and so on. 
While the usual theory reduces all to the mere 
association of locally separated excitements, such 
a theory emphasizes the view that the physio- 
logically determined functions must be supple- 
mented by an apperceiving subject which takes 
attitudes. We may call one the association 
theory, the other the apperception theory. We 
have seen that the association theory is insuffi- 
cient to solve the whole problem, but it is hardly 
necessary to emphasize that the apperception 
theory seeks the solution from the start in a 
logically impossible direction, and is thus still 
more mistaken than the association theory. 

The apperception theory, whatever its special 
label and make-up may be, does not see that the 
renunciation of a physiological basis for every 
psychical fact means resigning the causal ex- 
planation altogether, since psychical facts as such 
cannot be linked directly by causality, and that 
resigning the causal aspect means giving up the 
only purpose for which the inner life was ever 
transformed into psychical facts. If those ap- 
perceptive functions are seriously conceived as 
without physiological basis, they represent a 
manifoldness which can be linked merely by the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 89 

teleological categories of the real life, and we 
sink back to the subjectifying view which con- 
trols the reality of life, but which is in principle 
replaced by the objectifying view as soon as a 
psychical object is acknowledged as such. If 
the apperception theory, on the other hand, 
wants to live up to the demands of psychology, 
that is, to give causal explanations, it can do 
so only if it replaces the psychical objects by 
constructions which are themselves conceived 
on the analogy with physical objects. As soon 
as the ideas are pictured like balls which are 
pushed and rolled, then of course a kind of 
pseudomechanics and pseudocausality is possible 
for the psychical facts themselves, but in that 
case the whole indirect connection of psychical 
facts by means of the brain would be in all 
respects a useless theory ; we have then sufficient 
direct causality between the ideas themselves. 
Its shortcoming is only that the whole system 
is built up on a false metaphor which is to be 
rejected from the outset because it gives to the 
psychical fact that characteristic which by the 
fundamental principle of the differentiation of 
objects into physical and psychical is necessarily 
reserved for the physical objects. 

Of course the illogical apperception theory 
would not return in psychology in so many 
forms, did it not favor the illusion that it is less 
opposed than the association theory to the emo- 



90 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

tional demands of man. It is the old psycho- 
logistic absurdity that any theoretical idea about 
psychological objects can touch the subjectify- 
ing interests of the real life. The apperception 
theory, which comes home with the news that 
there is a corner in the psychical world where 
no causal explanation has as yet been found, is 
then welcomed as the bringer of happy hopes ; 
till later advices come we can still feel ourselves 
free and dignified. The philosophical under- 
standing of that which we mean by a psycho- 
logical truth and by a transformation into psy- 
chical objects, a transformation which would be 
utterly meaningless if the apperception theory 
were correct, is the only scientific way of over- 
coming such illusory conflicts. As soon as this 
fundamental misunderstanding about the mean- 
ing of psychophysical theories has taken place, 
it is quite natural that the most extreme form of 
the apperception theory should have the best 
popular chances. It would be represented in 
the so-called transmission theory, which considers 
the brain as unessential for the causal connec- 
tions of the psychical facts and acknowledges 
its function merely as an organ of transmission, 
whose destruction would not hinder the temporal 
continuation of the causal connection of psychi- 
cal objects. The immortality which the trans- 
mission theory seeks to secure to us is thus 
the continuous repetition of objects which have 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 91 

nothing in common with the real experiences of 
our inner life, and which cannot claim anything 
else than the fact that the psychologist must 
construct them for the purpose of transforming 
the teleological reality into a causal system. 
Needless to say after all these discussions that 
this real subjective life cannot possibly be in- 
terested in any psychophysiological theory, and 
that with the association and apperception and 
transmission theories equally it connects not the 
slightest emotional value, except those of logical 
satisfaction and disappointment. The philosopher 
who bases the hope of immortality on a theory 
of brain functions and enjoys the facts which 
cannot be physiologically explained, stands, it 
seems to me, on the same ground with the astro- 
nomer who seeks with his telescope for a place 
in the universe where no space exists, and where 
there would be thus undisturbed room for God 
and the eternal bodiless souls. 

IX 

We do not here enter upon metaphysical ques- 
tions ; we discuss the empirical brain theory, and 
only deny to the apperception theory the claimed 
right to recommend itself by illusory metaphysi- 
cal promises. But does this bankruptcy of all 
varieties of apperception theories necessarily 
force us back to the association theory ? I do 
not think so. The demand of the association 



92 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

theory that every psychosis should be accom- 
panied by a neurosis cannot be given up, but 
this neurosis may be thought in a richer way 
than in the scheme of the associationists. It 
seems to me, indeed, that the physiological the- 
ory works to-day with an abstract scheme with 
which no observation agrees. We do not know 
of a centripetal stimulation which does not go 
over into centrifugal impulses. The studies on 
the tonicity and actions of voluntary muscles, on 
the changes in glands and blood vessels, on tendon 
reflex centres, and so on, show how every psycho- 
physical state discharges itself into centrifugal 
functions. And yet these perceivable peripheral 
effects are of course merely a small part of the 
centrifugal impulses which really start from the 
end stations of the sensory channel, as most of 
them probably produce only new dispositions in 
lower motor centres without going directly over 
into movement, and others may fade away in the 
unlimited division of the discharge in the ramifi- 
cation of the system. Those milliards of fibres 
are not merely the wires to pull a few hundred 
muscles; no, the centrifugal system represents 
certainly a most complex hierarchy of motor 
centres too, and the special final muscle impulse 
is merely the last outcome of a very complex 
cooperation of very many factors in the centri- 
fugal system. Manifold as the incoming nerve 
currents must be, the possibilities of centrifu- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 93 

gal discharge and the dispositions in the nerv- 
ous motor system determine the degrees in which 
the ganglion cells can transform the centripetal 
into centrifugal stimulation. It is thus not 
only the foregoing sensory process, but in ex- 
actly the same degree also the special situation 
of the motor system, its openness and closed- 
ness, which governs the process in the centre. 
Whether the special efferent channel is open 
or plugged implies absolutely different central 
processes in spite of the same afferent stimu- 
lus. 

Here we have, then, a new factor on the phy- 
siological side, which is ignored in the usual 
scheme that makes the psychical facts dependent 
upon the sensory processes only and considers 
the centrifugal action of the brain as a later 
effect which begins when the psychophysical 
function is over. There is no central sensory 
process which is not the beginning of an action 
too, and this centrifugal part of the central pro- 
cess necessarily varies the accompanying psychi- 
cal fact also. As here the action of the centre 
becomes the essential factor in the psychophysi- 
cal process, we may call this view an action 
theory as over against the association and apper- 
ception theories of the day. The action theory 
agrees, then, with associationism in the postu- 
late that there is no psychical variation with- 
out variation on the physiological side, and with 



94 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

apperceptionism in the conviction that the mere 
association of sensory brain processes is insuffi- 
cient to play the counterpart to such subjective 
variations of the psychical facts as vividness and 
values of the sensations. It tries to combine 
the legitimate points in both views, and claims 
that every psychical sensation as element of the 
content of consciousness is the accompaniment 
of the physical process by which a centripetal 
stimulation becomes transformed into a centri- 
fugal impulse. 

This central process thus clearly depends upon 
four factors : firstly, upon the local situation of 
the sensory track ; secondly, upon the quantitative 
amount of the incoming current ; thirdly, upon 
the local situation of the outgoing discharge; 
and fourthly, upon the quantitative amount of 
the discharge. The first two factors are of course 
determined by the incoming current, which can 
be replaced by an intra-cortical stimulation from 
an associated centre, while the last two factors 
are determined by the dispositions of the cen- 
trifugal system. The association theory, which 
considers the first two factors alone, thinks them 
parallel to the kind and strength of the sensa- 
tion. The action theory accepts this interpreta- 
tion, and adds that the two other factors de- 
termine the values and the vividness of the 
sensation, — the values parallel to the local situa- 
tion of the discharge, the vividness to the open- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 95 

ness of the centrifugal channel, and thus to the 
intensity of the discharge. 

If the centrifugal discharge is inhibited, the 
channel closed, then the sensory process goes on 
as before, but the impression is faint, unper- 
ceived, while it may become vivid later as soon 
as the hindrance to the discharge disappears. 
The inhibition of ideas, which remains unex- 
plainable to the associationists, would then mean 
that a special path of discharge is closed, and 
thus the idea which needs that discharge for its 
vividness cannot come into existence ; the hyp- 
notizer's words, for instance, close such channels. 
Only discharges, actions, can be antagonistic, and 
thus under mutual inhibition ; ideas in themselves 
may be logically contradictory, but not psycho- 
logically while one action makes the antagonistic 
action indeed impossible and the inhibition of 
ideas results merely from the inhibition of dis- 
charges. If this view is correct, it is clear that 
while we strictly deny the existence of special 
innervation sensations, we can now say that 
every sensation without exception is physiologi- 
cally an innervation sensation, as it must have 
reached some degree of vividness to exist psy- 
chologically at all. 

With regard to the local situation of the motor 
discharge, the manif oldness of possibilities is evi- 
dent. The channels may be closed in one direc- 
tion but open in others ; the actually resulting 



96 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

discharge must be the product of the situation in 
the whole centrifugal system, with its milliards 
of ramifications, and the same sensory stimu- 
lus may thus under a thousand different condi- 
tions produce a thousand different centrifugal 
waves, all, perhaps, with the same intensity. The 
vividness would then be always the same, and 
yet the difference of locality in the discharge 
must give new features to the psychical element. 
A few cases as illustrations must be sufficient. 
We may instance the shades of time-direction; 
the same idea may have the subjective character 
of past, present, and future. It corresponds to 
three types of discharge : the discharge which 
does not include action on the object any more 
appears a past; that which produces action as 
present ; that which prepares the action as future. 
In this group belong also the feeling tones : the 
pleasurable shade of feeling based on the dis- 
charge towards the extensors, the unpleasant 
feelings based on the innervation of the flexors. 
Here belong the differences between mere per- 
ception and apperception, as in the one case the 
discharge is determined by the impression alone, 
in the other case by associations also. Here 
belong the characteristics of the abstract con- 
ception which may be represented by the same 
sensational qualities which would form a concrete 
idea and yet has a new subjective tone because 
the centrifugal discharge is for the concrete idea 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 97 

a specialized impulse, for the conception a gen- 
eral impulse which would suit all objects thought 
under the conception. Here belongs, also, the 
feeling of belief which characterizes the judg- 
ment ; the judgment differs psychophysical^ 
from the mere idea in the fact that the ideas 
discharge themselves in a new tonicity, a new 
set of the lower motor centres, creating thus a 
new disposition for later reactions. To be sure, 
many of these discharges lead finally to muscle 
contractions which bring with them centripetal 
sensations from the joints, the muscles, the ten- 
dons, and these muscle and joint sensations them- 
selves then become a part in the idea, for instance, 
of time, of space, of feeling. But the new part 
only reinforces the general tone which is given 
in the general discharge, and gives to it only the 
exact detail which gets its character just through 
the blending of these sensations of completed 
reactions with the accompaniments of the cen- 
tral discharge. 

A consistent psychology thus starts with the 
following principles : It considers all variations 
of mental life as variations of the content of con- 
sciousness, and this content as a complex object, 
including in this first presupposition a compli- 
cated transformation of the real inner life, a 
transformation by which the subjectifying view 
of real life is denied for the psychological system. 
Every content of consciousness is further con- 



98 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 

sidered as a complex of sensations, that is, of 
possible elements of perceptive ideas. Every 
sensation is considered as having a fourfold 
manifoldness, varying in kind, in strength, in 
vividness, and in value. The physiological basis 
of every sensation and thus of every psychical 
element is the physical process by which a cen- 
tripetal stimulation becomes transformed into a 
centrifugal impulse, the kind depending upon the 
locality of the centripetal channel, the strength 
upon the quantity of the stimulus, the value 
upon the locality of the centrifugal channel, 
and the vividness upon the quantity of the 
discharge. Every transformation of the chaos 
of so-called facts in the direction towards these 
ends which are determined by epistemology adds 
something to the system of psychological sci- 
ence. 

Also for these ultimate transformations in the 
service of explanation is valid what we empha- 
sized in regard to description. The scientist 
must do his work continually with the feeling 
that he seeks and discovers facts which preceded 
his seeking and which he merely brings to 

r view. But the philosopher, at least, cannot for- 
get that such is a low conception of truth, and 
that the work is a transformation of the reality 
for the fulfillment of our logical ideals which 
takes place ultimately in the service of our 

^duties. The seeker for truth is not a miner who 



PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 99 

digs and digs in the clay of reality till he by 
chance finds a lump of gold with his shovel, gold 
which has slumbered there for eternities. The 
seeker for truth creates like the sculptor who 
takes the valueless clay of reality to transform it 
under his hands into the precious plastic work 
which harmonizes with his ideals. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

I 

The defender of idealistic convictions who 
arms himself with philosophical arguments to 
fight against materialism finds himself in com- 
bat, not with one group alone, but with two — 
with those who through serious arguments come 
to an ti - idealistic views and with those who 
adopt idealism without arguments at all. They 
may favor idealism through sentimentality, or 
through mysticism, or, the more frequent case, 
through laziness and mere lack of understand- 
ing the arguments of the other side ; their 
view has no solid foundation, no consistency, no 
power of resistance. With the first group you 
can argue ; with the second group you cannot 
debate, as you speak a different language and 
think with a different logic. As soon as the 
real fight begins, you feel that the coincidence 
of aims is only a chance result without signifi- 
cance ; the help of these friends is only a hin- 
drance and a trouble, and they ought to be sent 
away, like the women and children of a besieged 
city before the real bombardment begins. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 101 

This old experience came to me with unusual 
force when a short time ago I expressed my 
educational convictions, which take the ideal- 
istic view of the teacher's work as against the 
materialistic doctrines of certain psychological 
schools. I maintained in some magazine articles 
that the individual teacher cannot make any 
direct use of physiological and experimental psy- 
chology for his teaching methods. Why this 
view alone lies in the line of idealism we shall see 
later. My articles were sharply attacked from 
the other side, as the progress of a discussion 
demands, and I was ready to go on fighting. 
But at the same time I was applauded by sym- 
pathizers who did not care for my arguments at 
all, and who hailed my side only because it was 
much more convenient not to study psychology 
and education. They cried naively : " Of course 
the man is right ; all experimental and physiolo- 
gical psychology is nonsense, and all study of 
education is superfluous ; let the teachers do just 
as they like ; our grandfathers made it just so." 
From day to day I became more doubtful with 
which side I disagreed more fully. If I warn 
education not to make progress in a wrong 
direction, must I proclaim by that that we ought 
to go backward? If I denounce a dangerous 
misuse of experimental psychology, do I there- 
by attack experimental psychology itself ? If I 
assert that the interest of the teacher ought not 



102 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

to go in a misleading direction, do I demand by 
that that the teacher ought to be dull and with- 
out interest ? If I regret that something has be- 
come the fad of dilettants, do I ask by that that 
scholars also ought not to deal with it ? and if I 
find fault with the recent development of child 
study, do I imply by that the belief that we do 
not need a modern science of education ? As long 
as such confusion exists among assenters equally 
with dissenters, we do not need so much argu- 
mentation as discrimination. We must have 
clearness and exact definitions before we decide 
about consent or opposition ; and it is not suffi- 
cient to dissolve the whole interlaced mass of 
conceptions like child study, child psychology, 
experimental psychology, physiological psycho- 
logy, educational psychology, education, instruc- 
tion, school teaching, etc., etc. ; but we must 
clear up above all the manifoldness of possible 
relations between these factors. An unpretend- 
ing effort in this direction is the only direct 
purpose of the following lines; they try only 
to separate clearly the different questions and to 
show soberly what some of us want and what we 
do not want. I do not fight now ; I only peace- 
fully draw a map which indicates the different 
opposing positions. 

We recognize at the first glance that our 
whole group of conceptions has two central 
points which are logically independent of each 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 103 

other : the child and psychology. To simplify 
the matter, we may start with these two ideas 
only. Psychology is the science which describes 
and explains mental phenomena, and what a 
child is we know perhaps better without than 
with a scholarly definition. Let us only keep in 
mind that in the happy fields of child study 
childhood lasts from the cradle to the end of 
adolescence, usually to the twenty-fifth year. It 
is clear that even between these two conceptions 
a number of relations are possible, and the will- 
ingness to transform one of these relations in 
reality does not include the duty to do the same 
with the others. The child, for instance, can 
be taught psychology, or it can be taught after 
the scheme of psychology, or it can be an object 
of psychology, or it can be an instrument of 
psychology, and so forth. We can be enthusi- 
astic for the one and nevertheless at the same 
time detest the other. 

The simplest of the cases mentioned is the 
first : the child may learn psychology. But even 
here several modifications are possible, as it may 
be learned at different ages, by different methods, 
and different parts of psychology may be in 
question. I for one should say that there is a 
field here for sound and productive work, and 
that we should not be hindered and crippled by 
the lack of experience in this region, or by the 
pitiable results which have had to be recorded 



104 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

in the past when an antiquated and indigesti- 
ble psychology was taught by incompetent per- 
sons to unwilling pupils, by the driest possible 
methods. For the instruction in modern em- 
pirical psychology, at least in its elements, the 
high school seems not at all too early a stage ; 
only the work must be fully adapted to the prac- 
tical experiences of the child, must be richly 
illustrated by simple experimental demonstra- 
tions, and must be given by competent men who 
could make a whole address out of every sen- 
tence they speak. There are few fields where a 
born teacher can better show his power and his 
wits. Philosophical psychology, including the 
historical forms of rational and speculative psy- 
chology, — certainly a most important subject for 
the college student, — like all other real philoso- 
phy, decidedly does not belong in the school ; the 
more so as any instruction in philosophy which 
means more than drill in logic and preaching in 
ethics can become valuable in any case only if a 
real scholar, and not a second-hand man, offers 
it. I should also exclude from the school the 
relations of psychology to the details of brain 
physiology and the whole of pathological psy- 
chology, and above all child psychology; the 
more so since we cannot hope that everybody 
would be in the happy situation of the teacher 
who reports in the " Pedagogical Seminary," the 
leading magazine for child study, that she 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 105 

brought a baby of three weeks into the class- 
room to demonstrate its smiling and crying and 
other functions of similar alarming interest. If 
we keep at a safe distance from such compromis- 
ing caricatures we can, I believe, expect highly 
valuable results from psychology instruction in 
the school. 

But the possibility of teaching psychology in 
schools is not at all confined to regular courses 
about the whole subject; special chapters of 
psychology find a most natural place in the 
different fields of the usual school work. It is 
impossible to teach physics without discussing 
acoustical and optical sensations; the drawing 
teacher may discuss the conditions of our space 
perception or optical illusions or the seeing of 
colors ; the study of history or literature not 
seldom brings with it a psychological analysis of 
the higher mental states, and a school child's 
curiosity rushes again and again to questions 
which only a sober knowledge of psychology can 
answer satisfactorily. It seems, therefore, not 
too much to demand that at least every high- 
school teacher should have some familiarity 
with the elements of psychology. He may be 
asked to teach it as a whole or he may be 
obliged to interweave parts of it with his other 
work; in any case he ought to have the facts 
of that science at his disposal as a material 
which he can teach like arithmetic or geography. 



106 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

This alone would be for me sufficient reason for 
welcoming every future teacher to the college 
courses of psychology, but this attitude would 
not have the slightest relation to the other ques- 
tion, whether the teacher ought to know psy- 
chology for the purpose of making use of it for 
his professional methods of teaching. But we 
do not stand as yet before this latter question, 
which is much more complicated. If we follow 
up the different relations between psychology 
and the child, the question next in natural 
order will leave educational theory still out of 
the play. 

II 

We have asked so far what the child can learn 
from psychology ; we must ask now what psy- 
chology can learn from the child. The question 
divides itself at once into many ramifications. 
Even if we abstract, as we planned to do, from 
all practical applications, and consider only the 
interests which psychology as a theoretical sci- 
ence can have in the child, we must from the 
start acknowledge two different points of view 
which are too often confused. The child's mind 
can be firstly the real object of psychological 
study, and secondly a vehicle for the study of 
the human mind in general, a tool in the hand 
of the psychologist. It is the same doubleness 
which we find, for instance, with regard to the 
pathology of mental life. The pathological mind 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 107 

as such can certainly be an important object of 
study, but it is such an object in the first place 
for the psychiatrist, not for the psychologist. 
The physician, of course, makes psychology as 
a whole serve the need of these pathopsycholo- 
gical cases which he analyzes in the hope of im- 
proving them. The psychologist, on the other 
side, attends to such abnormalities only as devia- 
tions from the normal soul, — variations which 
seem interesting to him only because they throw 
some new suggestive side light on the normal 
processes. He studies the disturbed harmony in 
the hope that the caricature-like exaggeration of 
special features will bring out a fuller under- 
standing of their normal relations. 

In exactly the same way we can approach the 
child's mind as an object worthy of our interest 
in and for itself, prepared to make use of our 
whole general psychological knowledge for the 
exploration of this new field ; or we can turn to 
the mental life of children, with the purpose of 
finding through this study new paths of en- 
trance to the old field of general human psy- 
chology. If the soul of the child is the object, 
all studies of this kind group themselves with 
inquiries about other sides of the nature of 
children, with the anthropology and physiology 
and pathology of the child ; a bundle of inves- 
tigations for which the name "child study" is 
perfectly correct, while to some ears the name 



108 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

"paidology" seems to sound better. If, on the 
other hand, the child's mind becomes an instru- 
ment for investigating the phenomena and the 
laws of the mental mechanism, then of course 
the observation and experimentation on children 
is merely one of the many methods of empirical 
psychology, coordinated to the pathological and 
hypnotical and physiological and other methods 
which supplement by ways of indirect observa- 
tion the direct self-observation of our laboratory 
work. It forms then a narrower group together 
with the psychical studies of animals and primi- 
tive races, all aiding in the understanding of the 
complicated mental life of the highly developed 
adult man, by showing the different stages of 
ontogenetic and phylogenetic development. Its 
special function can then well be compared with 
the service of embryology to general human ana- 
tomy. If child study is an end in itself, every 
fact in the child's mental experiences is of equal 
importance or at least of equal scientific dignity ; 
if it is only a method in the service of psycho- 
logy, science will carefully select only those facts 
by which the labyrinth of the developed mind 
becomes simpler and clearer while everything else 
remains indifferent. If child study is the ob- 
ject, we start from our knowledge of the man to 
interpret the child ; if child research is a method, 
we seek knowledge about the child as a starting- 
point for our interpretation of the man. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 109 

This is, however, not the only point of view 
from which to classify the manifold efforts which 
are possible in this realm ; it is the most central 
division, bnt it shows cross-sections with many 
other principles of division. The classification 
may, for instance, refer to the different stages 
of development, especially according as the time 
before or in or after school life is in question. 
But still more important : according as the ob- 
servation goes on under natural conditions or 
under the artificial conditions of experiment; 
according as the inquiries are of individual char- 
acter or seek for statistical results on the basis 
of large numbers; above all, according as the 
work is done by professional, at least specially 
prepared, psychologists or by psychological ama- 
teurs, who may be most excellent creatures in 
every other respect. Of course an exhaustive 
classification ought not to stop here. We can 
divide further ; for instance, as the psychologists 
in question are such as have their theories 
beforehand or such as do not, and as the dilet- 
tants who observe the children are people who 
know that they do not know psychology or peo- 
ple who don't know even that. 

The possible combination of all these factors 
secures such a manifoldness of types of research 
in this field that the mere collection of the results 
on the basis of coordination would contradict all 
principles of scientific methodology. If I may 



110 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

be allowed a word of criticism, I should not 
hesitate to claim that child study ought to be a 
method and not an end ; that it ought to be done 
individually and not statistically, by professionals 
and not by dilettants, more by natural observa- 
tion and less by experiments. These decisions 
hang, of course, closely together. If I take 
paidology as a science by itself, then perhaps 
I should also share that enthusiasm and de- 
light over heaps of statistical and experimental 
results which mothers, teachers, and nurses have 
brought and certainly will bring together. But 
all my instincts about the inner relations and 
connections of human knowledge resist to the 
utmost this artificial separation of child psycho- 
logy from general psychology. I may write a 
special book on the mental life of the child just 
as I can write a monograph on memory or on hyp- 
notism, but it has a final right of existence only in 
virtue of its necessary place in the whole system 
of psychology. To be sure, the chief reason for 
taking this attitude lies in a conviction which I 
must bring: forward in the following discussion 
again and again, and which is indeed the central 
motive for my position in all these debates. I 
shall indicate the point most quickly if I say : 
Psychology is a study of mental facts, but not 
every study of mental facts is therefore psycho- 
logy. That psychology is a science and there- 
fore every science psychology, probably nobody 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 111 

pretends, and yet the logic of the conclusion 
would not be worse than that which is so often 
offered to us when every gathering or interpre- 
tation or statistics of mental facts is claimed as 
psychology. Most of the material which the 
friends of child study heap together is, even when 
mental facts and not physical ones are in ques- 
tion, nevertheless not psychology at all; and 
that small remainder which really contributes to 
a psychology of the child's mind belongs so 
clearly to general psychology that nobody would 
dream of an artificial separation if it were not 
usually so hopelessly mixed with unpsychological 
odds and ends. 

Certainly the good appetite of psychology has 
sometimes become voracity in our days, and she 
has begun to devour all mental sciences, history 
and social life, ethics and logic, and finally, alas ! 
metaphysics ; but that is not a development, it 
is a disease and a misfortune. And when the 
necessary conflict between such high-handed psy- 
chology and the deep-rooted demands of the true 
life begins, such uncritical science must burst 
asunder. Psychology would learn too late that 
an empirical science can be really free and pow- 
erful only if it recognize and respect its limits, 
about which philosophy alone decides. The lim- 
its of psychology are easily understood. Psy- 
chology considers the mental life as an object 
which must be analyzed and explained, analyzed 



112 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

into elements and explained by laws. The psy- 
chologist, therefore, silently accepts the presup- 
position that the mental life is such an object and 
that this object is a combination of elements con- 
trolled in their connection by causal laws. In 
the reality of our inner experience our mental 
life has not at all these characteristics : the ideas 
are objects, while the feelings and volitions are 
subjective activities, and these objects are experi- 
enced as wholes and units, not as composita, and 
these activities as controlled by freedom, not by 
laws. Psychology thus presupposes for its pur- 
poses a most complicated transformation of the 
reality, and any attitude toward the mental life 
which does not need or choose this special trans- 
formation may be something else, but it is not 
psychology. Practical life and history, mental 
science and poetry, logic and ethics, religion and 
philosophy, all deal with mental life, but never 
with psychology as such. Not the material but 
the special standpoint characterizes the psycho- 
logist. 

Ill 

As soon as we are clear in regard to this ele- 
mentary philosophical principle we cannot in- 
deed doubt any longer that most of the so-called 
child psychology is partly history, partly eco- 
nomics and ethics, partly physiology, partly no- 
thing at all, but is decidedly not psychology. To 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 113 

be fair I choose as illustration one of the very 
best investigations in the field, one which seems 
to me seriously interesting and important : the 
extended statistical studies about the stock of 
ideas which a child has when it enters the school. 
The differences between city and country chil- 
dren, between different home influences, between 
different nations, and so forth, come clearly to 
view, and the results suggest a continuation of 
these studies — but these results do not belong 
to psychology. The material of this inquiry is 
ideas, but these ideas not with regard to their con- 
stitution and their elements, but with regard to 
their practical distribution : it is not scientific bot- 
any to find out in whose yard in the town cherries, 
in whose yard apples grow. Suppose the same 
investigation made for adult persons : among a 
thousand men of fifty years of age how many 
have had impressions from such and such ob- 
jects ? How many have seen a phonograph and 
how many a walrus ? The results would be a 
quite interesting contribution to the history of 
civilization, but nobody would think of classify- 
ing it under the psychology of the adult man, as 
we do not learn anything about the psychologi- 
cal structure and origin of an idea if we know 
that A happened to experience it while B never 
had a chance. Such an imitation of the so- 
called psychological studies on children by sim- 
ilar studies on adults will perhaps give us the 



114 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

readiest insight into their real character. The 
" Pedagogical Seminary " offers us a splendid 
collection of the teasing and bullying phrases 
which are in the mind of children, or it reports 
with careful statistics that among 845 children 
exactly 191 preferred wax dolls, 163 paper dolls, 
153 china dolls, 144 rag dolls, 116 bisque dolls, 
69 rubber dolls, and so on, or it studies the love 
poems of boys and discovers that among 356 
poems only 91 refer to the eyes, 50 to their ex- 
pression, 41 to their color — blue leading with 
22. We could choose just as well a hundred 
other illustrations. Now let us try to repeat 
such inquiries with adult men : let us find out 
what preferences they have in cigarette-holders 
and meerschaum pipes, or how often they refer 
to the eyes in flirting, or what their disponible 
material of nicknames and abusive words may 
be. The results will not be much less instruc- 
tive than those from the study of children, but 
surely you would not call them psychology. 

If we thus exclude everything which is not 
really psychological, there still remains a good 
set of problems which belong strictly to the 
psychology of the child ; the analytic study 
of its perceptions and associations, its memory 
and attention, its feelings and emotions, its in- 
stincts and volitions, its apperceptions and judg- 
ments, to be described and explained with regard 
to their elements and laws ; but this group can 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 115 

certainly not be separated from the psychology 
of the adult. There are the same elements and 
the same laws building up the mental life in all 
its different stages of development. The study 
of the child's mind then shows itself clearly as 
that which we claimed it to be : one of the 
many legitimate methods of studying the mental 
laws and elements in general. We could better 
have a special botany of the blossoms or a zoo- 
logy of the eggs as scientific ends in themselves 
than a separated psychology of the children. 
On the other hand, if it is truly a method and 
vehicle of general mind study, then certain con- 
sequences are unavoidable. In the service of 
general psychology child study must first select 
its problems. What is the use of analyzing with 
the doubtful means of indirect observation those 
psychical states which we can find as the objects 
of direct observation in our own minds? Only 
that must be selected which allows us to push 
the analysis forward by showing our complicated 
states as preceded by simpler and simpler ones. 
But if the leading principle is thus a selection 
of material best fitted for clearing up the de- 
velopment of the complex combination of ele- 
ments, it follows that the study of individual 
children is by far superior to the statistics in 
which the individual disappears, and that pro- 
tracted observation is by far more important 
than the experimental investigation of a special 



116 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

stage. It follows, secondly, that the work must 
be done by trained specialists or not at all. That 
child study which has for its aim only the collec- 
tion of curiosities about the child, as an end in 
itself, may be grateful to the nurse who writes 
down some of the baby's naughty answers or to 
the teacher who sacrifices half an hour of her 
lesson to make experiments in the classroom to 
fill out the blanks that are mailed to her. The 
students of that scientific child psychology which 
stands in the service of the general mind study 
know how every step in the progress of our sci- 
ence has depended upon the most laborious, 
patient work of our laboratories and the most 
subtle and refined methods, and that all this 
seductive but rude and untrained and untech- 
nical gathering of cheap and vulgar material 
means a caricature and not an improvement of 
psychology. And it is not only the lack of tech- 
nical training which brings these contributions 
so near to hunting stories and their value for 
scientific biology. No, it is, above all, the ab- 
sence of the psychological attitude. That is in 
my eyes not an opprobrium against the teacher. 
I consider it to the teacher's credit that the 
child is not an object of analysis for him, but I 
blame those who make the teacher believe that 
his observations nevertheless have value for psy- 
chology. 

Of course I know that some of the more sober 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 117 

leaders of this movement emphasize very little 
the scientific value of such private adventurous 
expeditions of parents and school-teachers, and 
praise most highly the expected result that the 
teachers themselves get thus a more vivid inter- 
est in the children. I have to discuss this point 
later, and acknowledge here only that the young 
scholars themselves begin to doubt whether the 
gossip contained in these blanks means science 
or rubbish. Those who doubt, however, ought 
not to find comfort in the frequent comparison 
that the guileless teacher may collect the facts o£ 
the young souls like the wanderer who brings 
plants and stones home which the naturalist will 
use later as material. No, psychological ma- 
terial cannot be put into the pocket like a stone ; 
it is not the fixation and communication of the 
found and perceived material only that have 
their difficulties, but the finding and perceiving 
themselves are in the highest degree dependent 
upon associations and theories already stored up. 
Finally, even if all the stuff is reliable and 
truly psychological, still we ought not to ex- 
aggerate our hopes for real information. As 
long as the thousand little facts are not con- 
nected by a theory, the facts are dead masses, 
and if they are only illustrations of a theory, 
they do not teach us anything new. It will 
be a very exceptional case that a new insight 
into a law can be reached in this chance way ; 



118 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

physics, in spite of Bacon's recommendation, 
has certainly never reached anything in this 
way. At best the result will be a psychologi- 
cal commonplace. The " Pedagogical Seminary" 
prints 375 thoughts and reasonings observed in 
children, and true to its scientific intention it 
adds that this material is not sufficient. But I 
confess that I do not see what profit could pos- 
sibly result for the psychologist from even three 
millions of such sayings. If we do not know 
the general facts of association, attention, apper- 
ception, and conception, then the whole material 
is mere gossip without psychological interest; 
and if we do know them and presuppose as a 
matter of course that the child has smaller ex- 
periences, fewer associations, and so on, then 
the material teaches us no more for the psy- 
chology of thought and reasoning than a collec- 
tion of any 375 sentences of adult persons would 
do. Yet these nobody would think of reprint- 
ing. We ought not to deceive ourselves with 
trivialities. It is not science to make exact sta- 
tistics of even the pebbles on the road or to 
collect the description of a hundred cases where 
the law of gravity was confirmed by the falling 
down of apples. Let us delay such luxury till 
the real duties of child psychology have been 
fulfilled; that is, till in the service of psycho- 
logy the development of single mental functions, 
especially of self-consciousness, of the will, of the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 119 

emotions, and of the ideas of space and time in 
individual children have been studied by really 
competent men with strictly scientific methods, 
a line of work in which our gratitude is due to 
Preyer, Perez, Stanley Hall, Baldwin, Sully, and 
other psychologists for a most valuable begin- 
ning. 

The only part of the work for which I should 
welcome the cooperation of untrained observers 
is the search for, not the real study of, abnormal 
cases. Pathological abnormalities in the child's 
mental life, in its emotions and imitations, its 
feelings and its will, are psychologically decid- 
edly instructive, and the psychologist has no pos- 
sibility of finding them if the layman does not 
draw his attention to them. Such unusual devi- 
ations in full development strike the eye of every 
man ; no special psychological attitude is neces- 
sary. 

Hitherto our question has been only to what 
extent theoretical psychology has an interest in 
children. In practice, however, this simple issue 
becomes far more complicated by the hopes and 
fears which may be connected with this scientific 
work in the interest of the children and of their 
educators. Of course psychology as such is not 
concerned in this question ; psychology does not 
work for a social premium and cannot be deter- 
mined in its course by social anxieties. But the 
psychologist, as a member of the social organ- 



120 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

ism, has to adapt his endeavors to the needs of 
society ; he must feel encouraged if he shares 
these social hopes and can feel himself an edu- 
cational benefactor, and he will modify his offi- 
cious disposition if he becomes convinced of the 
educational fears. The pessimistic group sees in 
all psychological experiments on children an un- 
sound interference with their natural develop- 
ment, a kind of mental vivisection which, by its 
artificial stimulations and tensions, may become 
harmful to the health of the nervous system 
itself. Even observation under natural condi- 
tions seems to them of unfavorable influence on 
the naivete and naturalness and modesty of the 
young subjects. Above all, they fear that the 
forced change of attitude in the teacher will do 
harm to the whole school life. In the interest 
of the teacher himself they add that such stud- 
ies in the schoolroom burden the already over- 
burdened man with work for which he him- 
self does not feel sufficiently prepared ; that 
he himself feels hampered by this new way of 
looking on the children, not as friends, but as 
interesting results of psychological laws; that 
he needs every minute of his school hours for 
his lessons, and that too often he confronts 
the dilemma, either to follow his educational 
conscience or to follow a superintendent who 
believes in the newest educational fad. The 
optimistic group of course holds to the exactly 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 121 

opposite view, sees no harm for the children, 
but the bliss of a deepened interest of the teach- 
ers in the children, and a subsequent lifting of 
the whole standard of school life. It is clear 
that such a background of antagonistic social 
movements complicates highly the theoretical 
problem. On the other hand, these hopes and 
fears about the practical effects of child psycho- 
logy cannot be separated from the wider ques- 
tion what the teacher has to expect from psy- 
chology in general. 

IV 

Our plan to map out the whole manifoldness 
of antagonistic tendencies in the entire psycho- 
educational field brings us thus necessarily to a 
large group of new problems. We have dis- 
cussed so far whether the child can study psy- 
chology directly, and secondly, whether psycho- 
logy can directly study the child. We must now 
ask also whether psychology cannot have indi- 
rectly an influence on the child through the 
medium of the teacher ; that is, whether the 
work of the teacher can be modified by psycho- 
logy. But the question shows at once many 
important subdivisions ; if we do not consider 
them, the result must be the confusion of Babel. 
The fact that we spoke before of the value of 
child psychology for the teacher, and are now 
discussing psychology in general, suggests from 



122 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

the start that we have to discriminate the differ- 
ent departments of our science. It may be that 
child psychology is educationally useless but 
physiological psychology excellent, or that ex- 
perimental psychology is the elixir but rational 
psychology the poison of education. In any 
case, however, we have no right to throw all 
such methodologically separated parts of mind- 
study together and to decide about right or 
wrong in a wholesale manner. But another di- 
vision of our question reaches still deeper : is 
psychology valuable to the teacher for his teach- 
ing methods directly, or only indirectly through 
the medium of a scientific educational theory ? 
In the first case the teacher himself transforms 
his psychological knowledge into educational ac- 
tivity; in the other case educational theory has 
accomplished for him the crystallization of edu- 
cational principles out of psychological sub- 
stances, and he can follow its advice, perhaps, 
even without himself knowing anything about 
psychology. The two cases are so absolutely 
different that here, still more, an assenting or 
dissenting attitude toward the one proposition 
cannot have any significance at all with regard 
to the other. It may be just those who are 
convinced that the teacher ought to study edu- 
cation, and that education ought to make the 
fullest use of psychology, who form the strongest 
opponents of the psychologizing teacher who 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 123 

manufactures his private educational theory from 
his summer-school courses in experimental psy- 
chology. I shall therefore separate the two 
questions fully, and ask first, how far the indi- 
vidual teacher can make direct use of psychology 
for his teaching ; and secondly, how far psycho- 
logy is useful for the science of education. 

I turn to the first question, which must now, 
as we have seen, be subdivided with regard to 
the different departments of possible mind study. 
A full exposition of the different parts of psy- 
chology and their complicated mutual relations 
would lead us, of course, far beyond the limits 
of this essay, but we cannot avoid giving our 
attention at least to some of the essential points. 
Of all the conceptions in question only that of 
child psychology does not need any further in- 
terpretation. We have seen that it does not by 
any means include every scientific interest with 
regard to the mental life of the child, but only 
those studies which consider its mental life under 
the categories of psychology, — that is, with re- 
gard to their elements and their causal laws ; we 
have seen further that a child psychology of this 
type does not claim to be an end in itself, but 
only a method of general psychology. 

Still simpler, if rightly understood, is the situ- 
ation of u experimental psychology." Here there 
is still less doubt that it is separated from the 
other branches, not by its special objects, but 



124 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

only by its special method — the experiment. 
The frequent misunderstandings which exist arise 
only when it is identified with indirect observa- 
tion in opposition to self -observation, or is claimed 
as a mathematical science in opposition to a 
merely qualitative analysis, or is understood as 
physiological psychology. All that is impossible. 
In the first place, experimental psychology is so 
little in opposition to self-observation that self- 
observation forms really the largest part of ex- 
perimental psychology ; we can say that the whole 
work of our modern psychophysical laboratories 
must be characterized as essentially introspection, 
but introspection under artificial conditions. To 
be sure, experiments with indirect observation 
also are possible, such as experiments on hypno- 
tized subjects, on animals, and so forth, but they 
are only exceptional guests in our laboratories. 
Experimental psychology in any case exists wher- 
ever psychological observations, direct or indirect, 
are made under artificial conditions chosen for 
the special purpose of the observation. Secondly, 
experimental psychology is so little a mathemati- 
cal science that every hope of introducing math- 
ematics, even into the smallest corner of it, must 
readily be recognized as a failure in principle. 
Psychical facts are not and cannot be measur- 
able, and the more and less in our mental life 
never means an addition of psychical elements ; 
we measure the physical conditions, but never 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 125 

the mental facts themselves. Finally, experimen- 
tal psychology is so far from identical with phy- 
siological psychology that we may even say that 
for its existence it does not need any relation to 
physiology at all. In our laboratories we study 
experimentally association and memory, attention 
and apperception, space sense and time sense, 
feelings and will, without being obliged to re- 
cognize officially that there exists a brain at all. 

That brings us to the question of what physio- 
logical psychology is, as the latter statement pre- 
supposes a definition of the term with which not 
every one would agree. The word has indeed 
been used with quite different meanings. We 
can separate especially two types of use, a wider 
and a narrower one. In the wider sense of the 
word physiological psychology means the study 
of mental phenomena in their whole relation to 
physiological processes, central or peripheral, in 
the brain or in the sense organs, in the nerves 
or blood vessels or muscles. In the narrower 
sense it means only the study of the relation 
between the mental facts and the accompanying 
physiological brain processes. The merely ter- 
minological question is not essential for us, and 
it is indeed in part only terminological, as there 
cannot be any doubt that studies of both kinds 
are legitimate. Nevertheless there are good rea- 
sons for getting rid of the first use of the word 
and for sticking to the second. The first use 



126 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

suggests clearly the mistaken idea that there 
can be a psychology which does not refer, not 
only for explanation but also for description and 
analysis, at every moment to peripheral physical 
facts. This is not a defect or a caprice of our 
present psychology ; for epistemological reasons 
there can never be any analytic description of 
psychical facts which does not refer directly or 
indirectly to the physical objects which are in 
relation to our organism. The psychical fact as 
such is just as indescribable as it is unmeasurable, 
since it is the object which by its very nature 
exists for one only and which remains therefore 
ever incommunicable. Every attempt to have a 
science which describes mental facts must thus 
at every stage relate the psychical facts to the 
physical facts ; in short, there cannot be any em- 
pirical psychology at all which from beginning 
to end is not simply physiological psychology in 
the wider sense of the word. The addition of 
the word " physiological " has then no longer any 
meaning ; it does not, if we think consistently, 
mark any special group of studies, as it belongs 
to all, and this whole is certainly better charac- 
terized by the epithet " empirical," which stands 
over against " speculative," than by " physiologi- 
cal," which has no correlative and which we need 
much more for a special group of psychophy- 
siological problems. The study of the mental 
facts in their relation to the physiological brain 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 127 

processes is indeed a scientific field by itself, with 
its own anatomical and physiological and patho- 
logical methods and with its own theoretical 
unity. But this field has an aspect quite different 
from what most people, and even most teachers, 
believe. They believe often that the analysis 
of psychical facts was in a poor and rather un- 
scientific condition till the developed brain phy- 
siology, with its cells and fibres and gyri and 
centres, came and helped her poor relation. 
Keally it is not at all so. Psychology knows 
endlessly more about these details than physiology, 
and in the development of the special psycho- 
physiological theories psychology has always 
led, and taught physiology how to interpret the 
chaos of brain facts. Brain physiology with- 
out psychology would have been perfectly blind, 
while psychology without detailed brain physio- 
logy would have stood exactly where it stands to- 
day, if we allow to psychology the general a priori 
postulate that every mental fact is the accom- 
paniment of a physical process. This postulate 
is merely epistemological, and therefore independ- 
ent of our knowledge of physiology. We must 
demand it because mental facts, as they are not 
quantitative, cannot enter into any causal equa- 
tion. The demand for a causal interpretation 
of the mental life includes, therefore, the postu- 
late that it must be transformed so that every 
element can be conceived as linked with a physio- 



128 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

logical process, but whether that process is going 
on in the occipital or in the parietal part of the 
brain is, for psychology, absolutely indifferent. 
In short, the whole physiological psychology 
consists of two factors : first, a general theory 
of psychophysiological relations which is based 
merely on philosophical and general biological 
principles and does not need physiology at all, 
and second, psychophysiological details which 
are important for the physiologist, but for psy- 
chology are a useless luxury. The special physi- 
ology of the brain, which in any case is still an 
almost unknown field, does not therefore help 
the psychologist anywhere; in my lectures on 
psychology before my students I hardly speak 
at all about the brain centres and the ganglion 
cells, and to base on them psychological insight 
turns our whole knowledge topsy-turvy. 



The three usually vague and misinterpreted 
conceptions of child psychology, experimental 
psychology, and physiological psychology have 
now taken for us clear and sharp forms, and we 
understand the relative importance of their aims. 
We must now ask of what use they are for the 
individual teacher. My answer is simple and is 
the same for all the three branches : I maintain 
that they are not of the slightest use. Whether 
the special mental facts are in the one or the other 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 129 

gyrus of the brain, whether the development of 
the child's mind favors the one or the other 
theory about the constitution of a special mental 
phenomenon with regard to its psychophysical 
elements, and finally, whether laboratory experi- 
ments follow this or that track, are questions of 
absolutely no consequence to the teacher. Of 
course I have not the right to speak about my 
personal attitude, as I started to show objec- 
tively the opposing positions, but I confess in 
this case I do not see two sides at all. I do not 
see how any one can hope that the teacher will 
profit for his teaching methods from these three 
fields the moment they are correctly defined and 
are not mixed in the usual melange with other 
things. Where a serious plea for them is made, 
always either the psychological fields are mis- 
interpreted or the teacher is substituted for the 
science of education. 

The case of physiological psychology is the 
simplest one. There was never a teacher who 
would have taught otherwise, or would have 
changed his educational efforts, if the physiologi- 
cal substratum of the mental life had been the 
liver or the kidneys instead of the brain. We 
have seen that here psychology has nothing at 
all to learn from physiology, and that it is a 
caricature of the facts if you tell the teacher 
that he can learn anything new about the men- 
tal life if he knows by heart the accompanying 



130 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

brain processes ; and if the teacher, in the hope 
of understanding the inner life of children better, 
studies the ganglion cells under the microscope, 
he could substitute just as well the reading of 
Egyptian hieroglyphs. All talk about the brain 
is, from the standpoint of the teacher, merely 
cant, and I say this frankly at the risk of giv- 
ing pleasure to those who do not deserve it — to 
those who are only too lazy to study anatomy. 

I insist that the situation lies in no way more 
favorably for child psychology and experimental 
psychology. Both sciences, as we saw, have as 
their aim to be methods of analysis and explana- 
tion of the normal psychical facts. Child psy- 
chology reaches that goal by following up the 
development ; experimental psychology reaches it 
by introducing artificial variations of the outer 
conditions. Both have thus merely the one pur- 
pose, to aid our looking on mental life as if it 
were a combination of elements, a composition 
of psychophysical atoms. I know that such a 
transformation of the inner life is extremely im- 
portant for many scientific purposes, but I am 
convinced, too, that such an atomizing attitude is 
directly antagonistic to the attitude of the true 
practical life, and thus opposed to the natural 
instincts of the teacher toward his pupils. In 
practical life our friends come in question for us 
only as units ; their mental life interests us only 
in so far as it means something to us and ex- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 131 

presses the real, willing personality. Decompose 
it for logical ends into its constructed elements of 
atomistic sensations, and their sum is no longer 
the inner life of our friend. The naturalistic de- 
composition into elements is most valuable for its 
purposes, but the purposes of life and friendship 
and love and education are others. There is no 
necessary competition between these different 
purposes ; that which serves the one is as true as 
that which serves the other, because truth never 
means a mere repetition of the one reality, but a 
transformation of reality in the direction of logi- 
cal ends. The view of man as a free being, as 
history must see him, is equally true with the 
view of man as an unf ree being, as psychology 
must see him ; and the friends' and educators' 
view of the child as the indissoluble unit and 
willful personality is just as valuable and true as 
the psychologist's view which sees it as a psy- 
chophysical complex mechanism. You destroy 
a consistent psychology if you force on it the 
categories of practical life, but you also destroy 
the values of our practical life if you force on 
them the categories of psychology. In experi- 
mental psychology, or in child psychology, the 
emotion may show itself as composed of circula- 
tory and muscular elements, and the will as made 
up from muscle and joint and skin sensations ; 
but if you offer such transformed product to the 
teacher, you do worse than if you should offer to 



132 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

a thirsty man one balloon filled with hydrogen 
and another with oxygen instead of a good swal- 
low of water. The chemist is quite right : that 
is water ; the fainting man insists that it is not, 
and life speaks always the language of the thirsty. 
Do I mean by all this that the teacher ought 
to be without interest in the mental life of the 
children, a dull and indifferent creature without 
sympathy for the individualities and desires and 
characteristics of the pupils ? Just the contrary 
is true. I detest this mingling of the teacher 
with psychology just because I do not wish to 
destroy in him the powers of sound and natural 
interest. It has been my point from the start 
that not every interest in mental life is psycho- 
logy, but that psychology studies mental life from 
a special point of view. I therefore separated 
child psychology sharply from other kinds of 
interest in children's minds, and the psychologi- 
cal sciences from the historical and normative 
sciences. Certainly the teacher ought to study 
children and men in general, but with the 
strictly anti-psychological view ; he ought to ac- 
knowledge them as indissoluble unities, as cen- 
tres of free will the functions of which are not 
causally but teleologically connected by interests 
and ideals, not by psychophysical laws. The 
study of the mental life of man from this other 
point of view is not a special science ; it belongs 
partly to history and literature, partly to logic 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 133 

and ethics and philosophy, partly to poetry and 
religion. Here may the teacher wander at his 
ease, and he will learn to understand man, while 
psychology teaches him only to decompose man. 
Have you never observed what bad judges of 
men in real life the psychologists are, and what 
excellent judges of men the history-makers and 
historians are ? Not a little of this desirable 
knowledge about the real inner man and his 
unity of intentions may be found also in the so- 
called " rational psychology." To be sure, in its 
deductions it is often too dependent upon met- 
aphysics, and, above all, we must not forget 
that, strictly speaking, it is not psychology at 
all, since it aims at synthesis, not at analysis ; 
but it is full of that which the teacher needs : 
suggestions to intensify interest for the child's 
mind by a deeper understanding of its volitional 
relations, and by a critical appreciation of men- 
tal values for the inner life. The teacher needs 
interest in the mental life from the point of view 
of interpretation and appreciation; the psycho- 
logist, with his child psychology and experi- 
mental and physiological psychology, gives him 
and must give him only description and expla- 
nation. Pestalozzi and Froebel were no psycho- 
logists. 

This standpoint does not at all exclude the 
existence of facts which demand that the teacher 
change his attitude and consider the child from 



134 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

the naturalistic atomistic psychophysical point of 
view ; and for this case also the teacher ought to 
be prepared. I have in mind the facts related 
to physical and mental health. To be sure, the 
questions of hygiene, of light and air and re- 
freshment and fatigue, of normal sense organs 
and muscles, as well as of normal mental func- 
tions, of pathological instincts and emotions, ab- 
normal inhibitions and mental diseases, are by 
a hundred threads connected with the school- 
room, and there is not the slightest doubt that 
they have to be treated from the psychophysical 
point of view. That is no inconsistency ; these 
facts belong indeed to an absolutely different 
system of relations, which has to be cared for, 
but which is not the system of educational rela- 
tions. The word which I am writing now be- 
longs to the stream of my thoughts and at the 
same time to the stream of my fountain pen — I 
have to take care of both. In the moment 
when the teacher takes care of the child's myo- 
pia or hysteria he is not teacher but psychophy- 
siological adviser of the child, just as it is not 
my function as a scholar to fill my fountain pen. 
Nobody overlooks that it is extremely important 
for society that the teacher should be well pre- 
pared to fulfill this naturalistic function, too. 
Much misfortune could be avoided if every 
teacher were especially trained to recognize 
pathological disturbances of the mind in their 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 135 

first beginnings, and for that he would indeed 
need some real psychology. Only do not say 
that he needs the psychology as teacher, while 
he may remain a good teacher in spite of the 
psychology which he studies in the service of 
hygiene. 

VI 

This last discussion referred only to the ques- 
tion how far psychology interests the individual 
teacher as a help in his efforts, but that was only 
one side of the more general problem, how far 
psychology can be helpful to education. There 
remains the other side : how can psychology in- 
fluence education through the mediating channel 
of a scientific educational theory; and it is clear 
that here again the questions are so independ- 
ent of each other that a mixture of the two 
must result in confusion. We can be convinced 
that the view of the teacher ought not to be 
psychological, and we can nevertheless demand 
that education as science make the fullest pos- 
sible use of every branch of psychology. Ex- 
actly that has always been, and is to-day, my 
hope. 

To be sure, the impression which theories of 
education make in our day is in no way over- 
whelming. The demand for educational wisdom 
is decidedly greater than the supply, and neither 
great systems nor imposing thoughts character- 



136 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

ize the pedagogy of our age. The whole edu- 
cational trade does its business to-day with small 
coin. Our time needs a man like Herbart again. 
But at least one very favorable condition for the 
strong development of education is given : the 
widespread conviction that we need it. No pre- 
vious time has so seriously called for a special- 
ist^ help from scientific education, and if, for 
want of revolutionizing great thoughts, we de- 
mand anything from it, then we demand that it 
shall carefully make use of the whole empirical 
knowledge of our time to transform it into sug- 
gestions for the teacher. A responsible admin- 
istration will then further transform these sug- 
gestions into obligatory prescriptions. Among 
this empirical knowledge which education unites 
into a new practical synthesis psychology cer- 
tainly plays one of the most important roles in 
determining the means by which the educational 
ends can be worked out. There is no reason to 
confine this to a special branch of psychology ; 
all that the analytical study of mind offers by 
experimental or physiological methods, by self- 
observation or by statistics, by child psychology 
or by pathology, by " old " or by " new " means, 
in short, the best and fullest psychology of the 
time has to be one of the tools in the workshop 
of education. The educational scholar differs in 
two essential respects clearly from the individual 
teacher. First, while the teacher's practical atti- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 137 

tude must suffer, as we saw, by the influence of 
the antagonistic psychological attitude in the 
same consciousness, the theoretical scholar, who 
is not himself a teacher, can of course easily com- 
bine the two attitudes and alternate between 
them. The teacher must live fully in the one 
attitude, and every opposite impulse inhibits 
him ; the student of education remains in a 
theoretical relation to each of them, and can 
therefore easily link them. He can take the 
whole wisdom of psychology and physiology and 
remold it into suggestions for the practical 
teaching attitude. The teacher ought thus to 
receive finally, indeed, the influence of psycho- 
logy, but only if the causal facts are transformed 
by some one else beforehand into teleological 
connections, adapted to the teacher's unpsycho- 
logical work. The bread which the teacher 
bakes for his classes comes indeed partly from 
the wheat on psychological fields, but the corn 
must be ground beforehand in the educational 
mills. And the second point is not less im- 
portant : such transformation of psychological 
investigations into ideas how to teach may suc- 
cessfully be done by the steady cooperation of a 
large number of specialists who make a whole 
lifework of it, but absolutely never by a single 
teacher. He may run through laboratories and 
digest statistical tables; he may commit to mem- 
ory the numberless papers of the periodicals 



138 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

and feast on microscopical ganglion cells, but 
nowhere will he find anything which suggests 
really a whole plan or a straight impulse. A 
thousand little odds and ends without the slight- 
est unity will be in his hand, and if he really 
believes himself to have the material for a little 
prescription, then he probably does not see how 
directly it contradicts other indications. It is 
impossible for him to survey the whole field, and 
nobody can ask him to do privately, by the way, 
a work which would give sufficient occupation to 
a whole generation. Even the slightest progress 
in the field presupposes a full acquaintance with 
the whole literature of the special subject. We 
cannot demand that from the much-burdened 
practical teacher, even for any one problem ; 
how absurd to hope it for all those which he 
practically needs : for memory and attention, for 
imagination and intellect, for emotion and will, 
for fatigue and play, and a hundred other im- 
portant functions. Do we not lay a special link- 
ing science everywhere else between the theory 
and practical work ? We have engineering be- 
tween physics and the practical workingmen in 
the mills ; we have a scientific medicine between 
the natural sciences and the physician. If a 
man prepared with the most wonderful know- 
ledge of the anatomy, physiology, pathology, 
and chemistry of the century should begin med- 
ical practice and write prescriptions without 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 139 

having passed through a training in real medicine, 
he would be either the wildest quack, curing 
one organ at the expense of a dozen others, or 
he would throw away his theoretical wisdom 
and follow his practical instincts. The ten thou- 
sand little laboratory experiments he knows 
would only confuse him if a whole generation of 
medical men had not, in specialistic cooperation, 
worked them up for practical use. Only, two 
points such a theory of education must not 
overlook. 

On the one hand, education forgets too easily 
that such psychophysical material is only a part 
of the stuff to be mixed and filtered and brought 
into solution before educational principles are 
crystallized. The causal analysis of the psycho- 
physical variations and possibilities must at every 
point be combined with the teleological inter- 
pretation of the ends suggested by ethics and 
aesthetics, by history and religion. It is not 
enough to substitute for a serious study and 
examination of the latter half a mere personal 
taste and capricious instinct, which takes as a 
matter of course that which ought to be scienti- 
fically criticised. Carelessness in the teleological 
part makes the synthesis just as dilettantic and 
useless as ignorance about the causal material. 
Nothing ought there to be taken for granted. 
Take one simple illustration instead of a thou- 
sand. The statistics show a very poor knowledge 



140 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

of the natural objects of the country on the 
part of the youngest school children. The in- 
vestigator draws the educational conclusion that 
preparation in that respect must be improved. 
But who gives us a scientific right to take for 
granted that early acquaintance with natural 
objects is at all desirable? ' Socrates did not 
think so; not the stones but only men can teach 
us. The best education is certainly not that 
which gives a little bit of everything. We must 
develop some and must inhibit other psycholo- 
gical possibilities; psychology as such cannot 
decide on that. Only when education succeeds 
really in amalgamizing the two sides, and be- 
comes something else than merely picked-out 
psychology, can we tell the teacher that he will 
find that study of man which he desires not 
only in philosophy and history and literature, 
but also in the handbooks and seminaries of 
education. 

But education must appreciate a second point 
also. It cannot expect to find all necessary psy- 
chological and physiological information always 
ready-made. As no science is merely a collec- 
tion of scraps, psychology as such cannot ex- 
amine every possible psychological fact in the 
universe, but must select just those which are 
essential for the understanding of the psychical 
elements and laws. This choice in the interest 
of psychology differs of course fully from the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 141 

choice of psychical facts which education would 
make for its own purposes. Here the science of 
education must take the matter in its own hand 
and must work up, with all the subtle means 
and methods of modern psychology, those psy- 
chological phenomena which are important for 
the special problems ; the most intimate relation 
to psychological laboratories is here a matter 
of course. In what form education will fulfill 
this demand may itself be at first a matter of 
educational experiment. Some believe in spe- 
cial psycho-educational experimental laborato- 
ries, some believe in special experimental schools, 
and recently the proposition was made for the 
appointment of special school psychologists at- 
tached to the superintendent's office in large 
cities. In any case the work has to be done ; 
the psychologist as such cannot do it, and the 
teacher cannot do it, either. For the psycho- 
logist it would be a burden, for the teacher it 
would be a most serious danger; the student 
of education alone can do it. Of course even 
these adjuncts of superintendents, and these prin- 
cipals of experimental schools, must never forget 
that their work always refers only to the one 
half, which is misleading without the other half 
— to the causal system, which must be harmon- 
ized with the teleological one. 

Personally I consider the psycho-educational 
laboratory as the most natural step forward. 



142 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

Such laboratories would be psychophysical labo- 
ratories, in which the problems are selected and 
adjusted from the standpoint of educational 
interest. All that has been done so far in our 
psychological laboratories for the study of atten- 
tion, memory, apperception, imagination, and so 
on, in spite of seductive titles, has almost never 
had anything to do with that part of these func- 
tions which is essential for the mental activities 
of the classroom. While the individual teacher, 
as we have seen, ought to keep away from our 
psychological laboratories because our attitude 
is opposed to his, the student of education ought 
to keep away from us because, in spite of the 
same attitude, we have too seldom problems 
belonging to his field. It is a waste of energy 
to hunt up our chronoscope tables and kymo- 
graph records for little bits of educational in- 
formation which the psychologist has brought 
forward by chance; sciences cannot live from 
the chances of work which is intended for 
other purposes. When in the quiet experimental 
working place of the psycho-educational scholar, 
through the steady cooperation of specialists, a 
real system of acknowledged facts is secured, 
then the practical attempts of the consulting 
school psychologist and of the leader of experi- 
mental classrooms have a safer basis, and their 
work in its turn will help the theoretical scholar 
till the cooperation of all these agents produces 



PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 143 

a practical education which the teacher will 
accept without experimenting himself. Then 
the teacher may learn psychology, to understand 
afterward theoretically the educational theory he 
is trained in, but he himself has not to make 
educational theory nor to struggle with psycho- 
logical experiments. 

There need be no fear that such psycho-educa- 
tional laboratories would have too few problems 
at their disposal ; a fear which may be suggested 
by the fact that the friends of this movement 
always refer to the same few show pieces, the 
experiments on fatigue, on memory, and on asso- 
ciation. The situation would develop just as 
twenty-five years ago did that of experimental 
psychology, which itself lived at first only from 
the crumbs that fell from the table of other sci- 
ences — physics and physiology. It also began 
with only a few chance questions, with the 
threshold of sensations and reaction times ; but 
since it has wrought in its own workshops, for 
its own points of view and interests, it has con- 
quered the whole realm of psychology. In the 
same way psycho-educational experiments will 
extend the work to all the functions active in 
education. Such new studies will then show 
how incomplete an essay like this is, and how 
many other relations still exist between the child 
and the study of mental life. But even this 
incomplete enumeration is sufficient to show at 



144 PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 

least one thing : the question whether there is 
a connection between psychology and education 
cannot be answered simply with yes or no, but 
must be answered by firstly, secondly, thirdly, 
fourthly — I do not discuss whether we can ever 
say also : lastly. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 



Common sense, which is to-day, as it has been 
since eternity, merely the trivialized edition of 
the scientific results of the day before yesterday, 
is just now on the psychological track. The 
scientists felt some years ago that the psycholo- 
gical aspect of the products of civilization was 
too much neglected, and that the theoretical 
problem how to bring the creations of social life 
under the categories of psychology might find 
some new and interesting answers in these days 
of biological, physiological, experimental, and 
pathological psychology. Thus the scientific 
study of the psychology of society and its func- 
tions has made admirable progress. Science, of 
course, took this only as a special phase of the 
matter ; it did not claim to express the reality of 
language and history, law and religion, econom- 
ics and technics, in describing and explaining 
them as psychological facts. Therefore science 
did not forget the more essential truth that 
civilization belongs to a world of purposes and 
duties and ideals; at present, indeed, science 



146 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

emphasizes decidedly this latter view, and has 
changed the direction of its advance. Common 
sense, as usual, has not yet perceived this 
change of course. Ten years may pass before 
it finds it out. Above all, one-sided as ever, 
common sense has misunderstood the word of 
command, as if the psychological aspect must 
be taken as the only possible aspect, and as if 
psychology could reach the reality. Therefore 
common sense marches on, still waving the flag 
of psychology, and with it its regular drum 
corps, the philistines. 

This pseudo-philosophical movement, which 
takes the standpoint of the psychologist wrongly 
as a philosophical view-point of the whole inner 
world, has found perhaps nowhere else so little 
organized resistance as in the realm of art ; for 
the real artist does not care much about the 
right or wrong theory. For the same reason, 
indeed, it may seem that just here the influence 
of a warped theory must be very indifferent 
and harmless. A one-sided theory of crime may 
mislead the judge, who necessarily works with 
abstract theoretical conceptions ; but a one-sided 
psychological theory of art cannot do such harm, 
as the artist relies in any case on the wings of 
his imagination, and mistrusts the crutches of 
theories. This would certainly be the case if 
there did not exist three other channels through 
which the wise and the unwise wisdom can influ- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 147 

ence, strengthen, and inhibit the creative power 
of art. 

The market influence is one way; that is a 
sad story, but it is not the most important fac- 
tor, as the tragedy of the market depends much 
more upon practical vulgarity than upon theo- 
retical mistakes. iEsthetical criticism is another 
way ; but even that is not the most dangerous, 
as it speaks to men who ought to be able to 
judge for themselves, although nobody doubts 
that they do not do so. The most important of 
the three, however, is art education in the 
schoolroom. Millions of children receive there 
the influence that is strongest in determining 
their sesthetical attitude ; millions of children 
have there the most immediate contact with the 
world of the visible arts, and mould there the 
sense of refinement, of beauty, of harmony. 
Surely the drawing-teacher can have an incom- 
parable influence on the aesthetic spirit of the 
country, — far greater than critics and million- 
aire purchasers, greater even than the profes- 
sional art schools. The future battles against 
this country's greatest enemy, vulgarity, will be 
fought largely with the weapons which the draw- 
ing-teachers supply to the masses. Whoever has 
attended their meetings or examined the exhibi- 
tions of schoolroom work knows that they do 
not lack enthusiasm and industry, and that their 
importance in the educational system is growing 



148 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

rapidly. But they are primary teachers, and 
primary teachers are men who adore nothing 
more than recently patented theories which ap- 
peal to common sense ; to-day they really feast 
on psychology. The greater the influence, the 
more dangerous is every wrong step on the the- 
oretical line, the more necessary a sober inquiry 
as to how far all this talk about psychology and 
art really covers the ground. 

We thus raise the question, what psychology 
and art have to do with each other, in its most 
general form, at first without any relation to 
the practical problems. If we acknowledge the 
question in such an unlimited form, we cannot 
avoid asking, as a preamble to the discussion, 
whether the work of art cannot be itself a man- 
ual of psychology ; whether, especially, the poet 
ought not to teach us psychology. We all have 
heard often that Shakespeare and Byron, Mere- 
dith and Kipling, are better psychologists than 
any scholar on the academic platform, or that 
Henry James has written even more volumes on 
psychology than his brother William. That is 
a misunderstanding. The poet, so far as he 
works with poetic tools, is never a psychologist ; 
if modern novelists of a special type sometimes 
introduce psychological analysis, they make use 
of means which do not belong to pure art ; it is 
a mixed style which characterizes decadence. 

It is true that discussion would be meaning- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 149 

less if we were ready to call every utterance 
which has to do with mental life psychology. 
Psychology does not demand abstract scientific 
forms ; it may be offered in literary forms, yet 
it means always a special kind of treatment of 
mental life. It tries to describe and to explain 
mental life as a combination of elements. The 
dissolution of the unity of consciousness into 
elementary processes characterizes psychology, 
just as natural science demands the dissection 
of physical objects ; the appreciation of a physi- 
cal object as a whole is never natural science, 
and the interpretation and suggestion of a men- 
tal state as a whole is never psychology. The 
poet, as well as the historian and the man of 
practical life, has this interpretation of the whole 
as his aim; the psychologist goes exactly the 
opposite way. They ask about the meaning, 
the psychologist about the constitution ; and the 
psychological elements concern the poet as little 
as the microscopical cells of the tree interest the 
landscape painter. The tree in the painting 
ought, indeed, to be botanically correct ; it 
ought not to appear contradictory to the results 
of the botanist's observations, but these results 
themselves need not appear in the painting. In 
the same way, we demand that the poet create 
men who are psychologically correct, — at least 
in those cases in which higher sesthetical laws 
do not demand the psychological impossibilities 



150 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

of fairyland, which are allowed like the botani- 
cal impossibilities of conventionalized flowers or 
the anatomical impossibilities of human figures 
with wings. We detest the psychologically 
absurd creations of the stage villain and the 
stage hero in third-class melodrama, the psy- 
chological marionettes of newspaper novels, and 
the frequent cases of insanity in poor fiction, 
for which the schooled psychologist would make 
at once the diagnosis that there must be simula- 
tion in them, as the insane never act so. We 
demand this psychological correctness, and the 
great poet instinctively satisfies it so fully that 
the psychologist may acknowledge the creations 
of poetry as substitutional material for the psy- 
chical study of the living man. The psycholo- 
gist believes the poet, and studies jealousy from 
Othello, and love from Romeo, and neurasthenia 
from Hamlet, and political emotions from Caesar ; 
but the creation of such lifelike men is in itself 
in no way psychology. 

The poet creates mental life in suggesting it 
to the soul of the reader ; only the man who 
decomposes it afterward is a psychologist. The 
poet works as life works ; the child who smiles 
and weeps causes us to think of pleasure and 
pain too, but it offers us no psychological under- 
standing of pleasure and pain. Just so the poet 
smiles and weeps, and if he is a great artist, with 
strong suggestive power, he forces our minds to 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 151 

feel with him, while we have only an intellectual 
interest if he merely analyzes the emotions and 
gives us a handful of elements determined by 
abstract psychological conceptions. Popular lan- 
guage calls a poet a good psychologist if he cre- 
ates men who offer manifold material for the 
analysis of the psychologist; when the poet 
begins to make that analysis himself, and to ex- 
plain with the categories of physiological psy- 
chology why the hero became a dreamer, and 
the dreamer a hero, and the saint a sinner, he 
will hinder his scientific effort by the desire to 
be a poet, and will weaken his poetry by his 
instructive side show. Meredith and Bourget 
do it, Ibsen never. Poetry and psychology are 
different, not because they speak a different 
language, but because they take an absolutely 
different attitude toward the mental life; the 
wisdom of the poet about the human soul does 
not belong to a handbook of psychology. For 
music and the visible arts the whole question 
is non-existent, or at least ought not to exist. 
A side branch of it, nevertheless, continues to 
grow in the old discussion whether music ought 
to " describe " the human feelings. The con- 
fusion about the logical meaning of description 
here lies more on the surface ; theoretically the 
case is the same as in poetry. The composer 
describes the emotions as little as the poet does ; 
tones and verses suggest the feelings, while it is 



152 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

an unmusical, unpoetical business to psycholo- 
gize about them ; but just that is our aim, if we 
consider the preamble as closed, and ask once 
more what art has to do with psychology. 

II 

We have seen so far that art is not by itself 
psychology ; the remaining question, in which 
all centres, is, then, how far art can become an 
object of psychology. The situation is simple. 
Psychology is the science which describes and 
explains the mental processes. A physical thing 
or process, even a brain action, is never, there- 
fore, an immediate object of psychology. Every 
work of art — the pencil drawing and the writ- 
ten poem, the played melody and the sculptured 
statue — exists as a physical thing ; hence the 
work of art itself is never an object of psycho- 
logy, and the description of it lies outside of the 
psychologist's province. The physicist describes 
the tone waves of a melody ; the geometrician 
describes the lines and curves and angles of a 
drawing. The physical object is in contact with 
the human mind at two points : at its start and 
its goal. Every work of art springs from the 
mind of the artist, and reaches the mind of the 
public ; its origin and its effect are both psychi- 
cal processes, and both are material for the de- 
scription and explanation of the psychologist. 
Two groups of psychological problems are thus 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 153 

offered, — two points of view for the psycholo- 
gical study of art; a third one cannot exist. 
The one asks, By what psychological processes 
does the mind create art ? The other asks, By 
what psychological processes does the mind en- 
joy art ? 

Modern psychology has attained to its rapid 
progress of late years through the wonderful 
development of its methods ; it believes no 
longer that one way alone will bring us to the 
goal ; we have to adapt the methods to the pro- 
blem. It is quite clear that these two sesthetical 
psychological problems demand different meth- 
ods. The question how the artist creates art 
lies beyond the self-observation of the psycholo- 
gist ; he must go back to the past. The ques- 
tion how the work of art influences the enjoying 
spectator can be studied by an analysis of his 
own sesthetical emotions. In the interest of 
this self - observing analysis he may introduce 
experimental methods, but he cannot make ex- 
periments with the artistic production. On the 
other hand, the artistic creative functions may 
easily be traced down toward the art of the child, 
of the primitive races, even of the animals. And 
so the first group of investigations makes use 
chiefly of the sociological, biological, and his- 
torical methods of psychology ; the second group 
favors experimental methods. The larger ma- 
terial is at the disposal of the first group ; the 



154 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

more exact treatment characterizes the second. 
We cannot sketch the results here even in the 
most superficial outlines ; we can recall only the 
most general directions which these studies have 
taken. 

First, the psychology of the art-creating pro- 
cess. The aesthetical psychologist, in our days 
of Darwinism, goes back to the play of animals. 
Biologically this is easily understood; the fre- 
quent playful contests are a most valuable train- 
ing for action, — as necessary, therefore, for the 
organism in the struggle for existence as is any 
other function of the nervous system, and yet 
they contain the most important elements of 
aesthetic creation : they are actions which are 
useless for the present state of the organism, 
carried out for enjoyment only. Social psy- 
chology finds the more complicated forms of the 
same impulses in the life of savages. We see 
how the primitive races accompany their work 
by rhythmical songs, how their dances stir up 
lyrical poetry, how their tools and vessels and 
weapons and huts become decorated, how art 
springs from the religious and social and tech- 
nical life. The psychologist links these first 
traces of art with the productions of civilized 
peoples. His interest is not that of the philo- 
logical historian ; he does not care for the single 
work of art as the unique occurrence ; no, he 
looks for the psychological laws which under the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 155 

varying circumstances produce just the given 
works of poetry and sculpture, of music and 
architecture and painting. We learn to under- 
stand how climate and political conditions, tech- 
nical, material, and social institutions, models 
and surrounding nature, brought it about that 
Egypt and China and India, or Greece and Italy 
and Germany, had just their own development 
of artistic production. Art becomes thus an 
element of the social consciousness, together 
with law and religion, science and politics ; but 
art is psychologically still more interesting than 
any other function of the national soul, because 
it is less necessary for the biological existence 
than any other production of man. Art is there- 
fore freer, follows more easily every pressure 
and tension, every inner tendency and outer 
opportunity ; it can fully disappear even in the 
strongest social organism, and can break out in 
fullest glory even in the weakest sociological 
body. It is in its incomparable manifoldness 
and easiness of adaptation that art shows best 
how the mental products of man are dependent 
upon the totality of variable conditions. 

While such a sociological view contrasts dif- 
ferent periods and nations, psychology does not 
overlook the differences among individuals. The 
general artistic level of the whole social mind 
is only one side of the problem; the varia- 
tion of individuals above and below this level, 



156 PSYCHOLOGY AND AKT 

from the anti-aesthetic philistine to the greatest 
genius, is the other side, and here also the de- 
pendence upon the most diverse conditions at- 
tracts interest. The psychologist consults bio- 
graphy, especially the autobiographies of poets 
and painters, and follows up most carefully the 
subtle influences which fertilized the imagina- 
tion and gave abnormal direction to the person- 
ality. 

Studying thus the artistic production in indi- 
viduals at all times and at all places, psychology 
finally abstracts a general understanding of the 
creative process and its conditions. There ap- 
pears nothing mysterious in it : by manifold 
threads it seems connected with the mental func- 
tions of simple attention, with inhibition and 
suggestion ; in other directions with dreams and 
illusions, and also with the abnormal functions 
of hypnotism and insanity. It is a most com- 
plex process, truly, in which the whole personal- 
ity is engaged, but it is connected by short steps 
with so much simpler events in mental life, and 
it can so easily be traced back to the artistic ele- 
ments in the child, that the psychologist has no 
reason to despair ; the artistic function of the 
brain is not beyond the causal understanding. 
The machinery of modern psychological concep- 
tions, the atomistic sensations and their laws of 
association and inhibition, can theoretically ex- 
plain it in its entirety from the schoolboy's 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 157 

drawing of profiles on his blotting-paper up to 
Michael Angelo's decoration of the dome of St. 
Peter's with immortal religious frescoes. 

Ill 

Very different indeed are the methods by 
which we investigate our second group of aesthet- 
ical problems, the psychological effect of the 
beautiful object. Experimental psychology en- 
ters here into its rights. When the students of 
mental life, twenty years ago, took up the exact 
method of natural science and worked out ex- 
perimental schemes for the most refined analysis 
of psychical processes, it seemed at first a matter 
of course that only the intellectual processes, 
especially the functions of perception, and per- 
haps the elementary activities, would offer them- 
selves to such inquiries. But slowly the new 
method has reached and conquered one field 
after another, — memory and imagination, asso- 
ciation and apperception, feeling and emotion, 
undeveloped and abnormal mental states; and 
now, in different places, experimental work is 
dealing with the most delicate psychical fact, the 
aesthetical feeling and its conditions. 

Fechner gave a strong impulse to such an ex- 
perimental study of aesthetic elements a long 
time ago. He asked systematically a large num- 
ber of persons which one of a set of rectangles, 
for instance, each of them preferred ; the ten 



158 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

forms varied from a square to a rectangle with a 
length of five and a breadth of two inches. He 
found a marked sesthetical preference for those 
forms which are determined by the golden sec- 
tion ; that is, in which the short side stands to 
the long side as the latter stands to the sum of 
both. To-day the work transcends in every di- 
rection such elementary beginnings. In the first 
place, it is not confined to a special art. Music 
and poetry share equally with the visible arts. 
The sesthetical harmony and discord of tones, 
their relation to beats and overtones, to the 
fusion and the discrimination of tones, to timbre 
and duration ; in the same way, the musical 
properties of rhythm, its relations to the atten- 
tion and time sense, to the physiological pro- 
cesses of breathing and muscle tension, and to 
many other psychophysical functions, — all these 
have become the problems of the experimental 
psychologist. These studies of musical rhythm 
naturally turn the attention toward the elements 
of poetry ; the experimental study of rhythm in 
the verse, and its relation to the position of the 
rhyme, to the length of the stanza, to the fluc- 
tuations of apperception, to the physiological 
functions, and so forth, is exceedingly promising, 
although still in its beginning. 

Much more developed is the attempt to reach 
experimentally the characteristics of the visible 
arts. Material and form, above all color and 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 159 

shape, offer themselves in an unlimited series of 
problems. The color spectrum has always been 
at home in the laboratory, but the psychologist 
has studied color as an element of perception or 
as a function of the eye, not as the object of 
aesthetical feeling. His studies now take a new 
direction and ask which of two colors is preferred. 
How does this preference depend upon saturation, 
brightness, extension? What combination of 
colors is agreeable : how does this effect depend 
upon the relative extension of the colored sur- 
face; how upon the colored materials and the 
relation between their intensity or their white- 
ness ? Which shapes and angles and sections are 
preferred : how does this preference depend upon 
associations, or upon our bodily position, or upon 
eye movements ? How does the plastic effect, 
in stereoscopic vision for example, influence the 
intensity of aesthetic feeling; how does move- 
ment influence it, or the combination of shape 
with color ? In a series of rectangles or ellipses 
or bisected lines, is only one of them agreeable, 
or has the curve of our aesthetical pleasure sev- 
eral maximal points ? 

The experimental investigation may come 
much nearer still to the problem of fine arts. I 
take as illustration a series of experiments which 
make up part of a recent thesis from the Har- 
vard laboratory. The problem is the pleasing 
balance of two sides of an aesthetic object. That 



160 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

is, of course, realized in the simplest way by geo- 
metrical symmetry as many works of architec- 
ture show it; we have this pleasing feeling of 
equilibrium, also, when we see a well-composed 
building of which the two halves are far from 
identical, and every painting shows this ideal 
symmetry of composition without the monotony 
of geometrical uniformity; so it is even in the 
most irregular Japanese arrangement. The ques- 
tion arises under what conditions this demand 
for balance is fulfilled, if the objects in both 
halves are different. Translated into the meth- 
ods of experimental psychology, the question 
would be, how far, for instance, a long verti- 
cal line must be from the centre of a framed 
field, if a line of half its length is at a given 
distance from the centre on the other side ; how 
far if a point or a curve of special form or two 
lines are there. The variations are endless. In 
an absolutely dark room is a framed field of 
black cloth, which is so illuminated that no other 
object in the room is visible ; by a little device, 
bright fines, points, curves, also letters, pictures, 
objects, can be made to move over this field 
without showing the moving apparatus, while 
the exact position of each is indicated on a scale. 
One line may be given on the left side, and the 
experimenter has to find the most pleasing posi- 
tion of a double line on the other, imitating thus 
the case when two figures are to be on one side 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 161 

of a painting, while one only is to balance them 
on the other side ; where must it stand ? Start- 
ing from such simple lines, the investigation 
turns to more complicated questions : What is 
the influence of the impression of depth ? — for 
instance, a flat picture on one side, a picture 
representing depth on the other. What is the 
influence of interest ? — a meaningless paper on 
one side, a paper of equal size with interesting 
figures on the other side. What is the influence 
of apparent movement ? — a picture of a resting 
object on one side, an equally large object which 
suggests movement in a special direction on the 
other. So the problem can easily be carried to a 
complication of conditions which does justice to 
the manifoldness of principles involved in the 
composition of paintings, sculptures, decorations, 
interiors, buildings, and landscapes. If, finally, 
all these experiments are carried out under dif- 
ferent subjective conditions, in different states of 
bodily position, of eye movement, of distance, 
of attention, of fatigue, under different degrees 
of illumination, with different colors, with differ- 
ent associations, all with different subjects and in 
steady relation to the real objects of historical 
art, we learn slowly to understand our aesthetic 
pleasure in the balance of a composition, and its 
relation to the functions of our body. 

Some one may say : All these experiments are 
too simple ; they may be quite interesting, but 



162 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

they never reach the complication of real art. 
What are those simple figures beside a Madonna, 
those primitive harmonies beside a symphony ? 
Yet is it a reproach to the physicist that he 
studies the nature of the gigantic thunderstorm, 
not from an equally large electrical discharge, 
but from the tiny sparks of his little labora- 
tory machine ? And if the physicist is inter- 
ested in the waves of the ocean, he studies the 
movements in a small tank of water in his work- 
ing-room, and introduces simple artificial move- 
ments. It is just the elementary character of 
experimental methods which guarantees their 
power for explanation ; and sesthetical effects 
can be psychologically understood only if we 
study their elements in the most schematic way 
possible. The necessary presupposition is, of 
course, that the sesthetical attitude itself can be 
maintained in the laboratory rooms, and there 
is no reason for being skeptical about that. 
With regard to practical emotions such skepti- 
cism may be correct : we cannot love and hate, 
nor admire and detest in the laboratory, and it 
may even be said that the joy of the laboratory 
is not agreeable, and the pain is not painful. 
But the aesthetical emotion remains intact pre- 
cisely on account of the absence of every prac- 
tical relation in it. The beautiful or the ugly 
thing lasts as such in every corner of our work- 
shop. 



PSYCHOLOGY AXD ART 163 

The experimental study of the psychological 
effect of art seems thus even more safely housed 
than the biological and historical study of the 
psychological production of art, and both to- 
gether form already a psychological system of 
aesthetics which certainly still has blanks, but 
which is surprisingly near completeness. Psy- 
chology will go on in this way till the most deli- 
cate cause and the most subtle effect of each 
artistic work are understood by the action of 
causal laws, like any other cause and effect in 
nature. 

IV 

Before us lies the question which is important 
for the teacher : how far the results of such 
studies can become productive, or at least sug- 
gestive, for instruction in artistic drawing. Here 
again we must separate the two sides, — the 
causes and the effects of the beautiful objects. 
The causes which produce the drawing are the 
activities of the pupil ; the effects are the im- 
pressions on the spectator. The study of the 
causes will help us to understand how to train 
the sesthetieal activities of the pupil ; the study 
of the effects will help us to advise how the 
drawing or painting should be made up in order 
to please others. The study of the causes sug- 
gests to us methods of teaching ; the study of 
the effects suggests rules and facts which are 



164 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

to be taught. The study of the causes interests 
only the teacher who handles the pupil ; the 
study of the effects offers insight which the 
teacher may share with the pupil. 

Think first of the effects. Psychology has 
analyzed the impressions on our sense of beauty, 
and each fact must express a rule which can 
be learned. Blue and red are agreeable, blue 
and green are disagreeable : therefore combine 
red and blue, but not green and blue. The 
golden section of a line is the most agreeable of 
all divisions : therefore try to divide all lines, 
if possible, according to this rule. Such psy- 
chological prescriptions hold, of course, for all 
arts : do not make verses with lines of ten feet ; 
do not compose music in a scale of fifths. Step 
by step we come to the prescription for a tra- 
gedy, for a symphony, for a Renaissance palace; 
how much more for the details of a simple draw- 
ing ! Fill the space thus and thus ; take care of 
good balance ; if there is a long line on one 
side, make the short line on the other side nearer 
to the centre : these are sesthetical prescriptions 
which can be learned and exercised like the laws 
of perspective for architectural drawing. When- 
ever the pupil follows the rules, his drawing will 
avoid disagreeable shocks to the spectator. I 
am free, I trust, from the suspicion that I over- 
estimate the value of experimental psychology 
for teachers ; I have often attacked its misuses. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 165 

Here the case is quite different. Such prescrip- 
tions do not prescribe the ways of teaching, but 
are material of instruction. There is no other 
school subject for which psychology supplies 
such material. Mathematics and natural sci- 
ences, languages and history, are not learned in 
school with reference to their psychological ef- 
fects. Art, however, has an absolutely excep- 
tional position. My belief, therefore, that meth- 
ods of teaching cannot be learned to-day from 
the psychological laboratory is no contradiction 
of my acknowledgment that artistic prescrip- 
tions, worthy to be taught, can be deduced from 
psychology. I see with great pleasure that the 
development in this direction goes steadily on, 
and that children learn easily and joyfully the 
ways of avoiding ugly lines and arrangements. 

My theoretical objections against teaching on 
the basis of psychological knowledge interfere 
much more with the pedagogical results which 
may perhaps be indicated by the study of the 
psychological causes of art. If we apply here our 
theoretical insight at all, the result cannot have 
the form, Teach your pupils to make the draw- 
ing thus and so ; but the form, Teach thus and 
so your pupils to make a drawing. If we un- 
derstand the causes which produce a beautiful 
drawing, and if by our teaching we can influ- 
ence the central system of the child so that the 
causes for such production are established, then 



166 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

it seems that the goal is reached. But we are 
not only far from a full understanding ; we are 
endlessly farther from such desired influences. 
To know the chemical constitution of an egg 
does not mean the power to produce an egg 
which can be hatched. We cannot make a 
genius, we cannot make talent ; and by itself the 
psychological analysis only indicates, and that but 
slightly, how to evolve from a bad draughtsman 
a good one. We may make the general abstrac- 
tion that constant training is a good thing ; to 
reach such a triviality, however, we need psycho- 
logy as little as we need scientific physiology to 
find out that eating is useful for our nourish- 
ment. Wherever psychological speculation goes 
farther, it is finally dependent upon secondary 
factors which are determined by presuppositions 
of non-psychological character, and thus the 
results may be quite contradictory : the one re- 
commends the study of nature, the other only 
imagination ; the one proposes flowers for mod- 
els, the other geometrical figures ; the one lines, 
the other colors. Psychology listens carefully 
to all, but is responsible for none of these propo- 
sitions. An examination of the papers which 
drawing-superintendents and drawing-teachers 
usually read at their meetings shows, indeed, 
that they belong for the most part to a species 
well known in all our educational gatherings. 
The first half of each paper is made up of famil- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 167 

iar sentences taken from good textbooks of phy- 
siological psychology, — the ganglion cells of 
the optical centres play the chief role in the 
drawing associations, — and the second half of 
the paper contains a list of correct educational 
suggestions ; only the chief thing, the proof that 
the suggestions are really consequences of the 
textbook abstracts, is forgotten. The two parts 
have often not the slightest connection. The 
second half alone would appear commonplace, 
and the first alone would appear out of place ; 
together they make a scholarly impression, even 
if they have nothing to do with each other. 

Perhaps one other danger in these practical 
movements of to-day deserves mention. The 
fact that drawings, paintings, pictures, please us, 
encourages the working out of technical prescrip- 
tions from them for instruction in art ; but the 
pleasure must be a pure and natural one, as little 
as possible dependent upon fugitive fashions and 
capricious tastes ; and if our pleasure is a refined 
eccentricity, or even perversity, it is certain that 
we have no right to infect with it the taste of 
the younger generation. Seldom has this danger 
been so near as in our time, with its preraphael- 
itic and Japanese preferences, with its poster style 
and its stylistic restlessness. The healthy atmo- 
sphere for the taste of the child is harmonious 
classical beauty. The man who has passed his 
training in pure beauty may reach a point where 



168 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

a reaction against classicism is a sonnd and ma- 
ture sesthetical desire, but to begin with eccentric 
realism or with mysterious symbolism in an im- 
mature age is a blunder. The educational mis- 
take becomes worse if that style is allowed in 
the schoolroom which is over-indulged in our 
time, and which is most antagonistic to the 
child's mind : I mean the primitivistic style of 
our posters and bindings. The simple forms of 
primitivistic art are not a real returning to the 
beginnings of art, which would be quite adapted 
to children. No ; this style means an ironical 
playing with the primitive forms on the basis of 
a most artful art. It is masquerading with the 
costumes of simplicity, not real desire for simple 
nature ; and the spirit of irony alone makes it 
possible, and so dangerously attractive for our 
taste. If a school exhibition of drawings in the 
style of the Yellow Book appears to our eye 
pleasant and almost refreshing, after the tiresome 
elaborations of our own school-time, it is our 
moral duty to ask, not what we like, but what 
children ought to learn to like. Irony toward the 
most mature products of civilization ought not 
to flourish in a child's mind ; and if the ironical 
curves of the Beardsley style become the trained 
methods of children, who finally believe that 
they really see nature in conventionalized poster 
style and use those lines thoughtlessly as pat- 
terns, the result is decidedly a perverse one. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 169 

Nevertheless, the future may be wiser ; psycho- 
logy will perhaps help pedagogics to find the 
way to develop the facility of pupils in produ- 
cing fair drawings ; and if we are willing to take 
the hope for the fact, we may say that psycho- 
logy gives to the teacher prescriptions for train- 
ing the child to draw better and better, and, 
above all, prescriptions which the child itself 
can learn, prescriptions for the composition and 
arrangement of a drawing which shall please 
others. Art can thus be fully described psycho- 
logically and explained with regard both to its 
conditions and to its effects, and both groups of 
facts can become suggestive for the construction 
of rules for the teaching of drawing. The rela- 
tions of psychology and art are then important 
and suggestive ones ; and yet, is that our final 
word ? Has philosophy nothing else to say ? 



I know quite well that there are plenty of men 
who would say, Yes, that is the whole story. I 
think, however, the number is increasing of those 
who see that while half a truth is true as far 
as its half goes, half a truth is a lie if it pre- 
tends to be the whole. It seems to me, indeed, 
that this psychological scheme is one-sided, and 
that our time confronts dangers for its ideal life 
if triumphant psychology crushes under its feet 
every idealistic opposition. It is with art here 



170 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

exactly as with science and with morality. Psy- 
chology proclaims : We can describe and explain 
every thought of science and every decision of 
morality from an atomistic naturalistic point of 
view ; we can understand it as the necessary 
result of the foregoing psychophysical condi- 
tions. There is, then, no absolute truth in sci- 
ence, no absolute virtue in morality ; duties are 
trained associations, and the value of our actions, 
as of our thinking, lies in their agreeable effects. 
Art easily joins the others ; if there is no truth 
and no virtue which is more than the product 
of circumstances, then there is no beauty which 
has absolute value; then beauty has no other 
meaning than that which psychology describes ; 
it is the effect of certain psychological processes, 
and the cause of certain agreeable psychological 
results ; and if we are careful to prepare those 
conditions and to insure that outcome, then we 
have done all that the sesthetical luxury of soci- 
ety can wish for its entertainment. 

I do not deny the right of psychology to 
consider the world of beautiful creations from 
such a point of view, and as a psychologist I do 
my best to help in such investigations; but I 
cannot forget that this view-point is an artificial 
one for living, real art ; that it is artificial both 
for the subject who creates art and for the 
subject who enjoys art ; that it is artificial wher- 
ever art is felt in its full meaning. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 171 

I say that psychology has its full right of 
way within its own limits ; it has limits, however, 
and they are much narrower than the superficial 
impression may make us believe. Psychology 
has to describe and to explain mental lif e ; but 
description and explanation are possible only for 
objects. Explanation always presupposes de- 
scription, and the very idea of description pre- 
supposes the existence of objects. Psychology 
considers mental life, therefore, only in so far as 
it can be thought as a series of existing objects, 
— objects which exist in consciousness as phy- 
sical objects exist in space. 

We have not to ask here why it is important 
for the purposes of life and thought to consider 
the mental world as if it were a world of objects. 
We are sure that in the primary reality our 
inner lif e does not mean to us such a world of 
objects only. Our perceptions and conceptions 
may reach us as objects, while our feelings, our 
emotions, our judgments, our volitions, do not 
come in question with us first as objects which 
we passively perceive, but as activities which we 
live out, as activities the reality of which cannot 
be described and causally explained ; it must be 
felt and understood and interpreted. In short, 
we are not merely passive subjects with a world 
of conscious objects; we are willing subjects, 
whose acts of will have not less reality in spite 
of the fact that they are no objects at all. To 



172 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

consider the mental world, including feeling and 
the will, psychologically means an artificial trans- 
formation and substitution which may have its 
value for special purposes, but which leads us 
away from reality. The reality of the will and 
feeling and judgment does not belong to the 
describable world, but to a world which has to 
be appreciated; it has to be linked, therefore, 
not by the categories of cause and effect, but by 
those of meaning and value. And in this world 
of will relations grows and blossoms and flowers 
Art. 

Let us examine the characteristics of this great 
network of will attitudes, in which the personality 
feels itself a willing subject, and acknowledges 
all other subjects as volitional also. One distinc- 
tion is of paramount importance : our will may 
be thought of as an individual attitude, or it 
may arise with the meaning of an over-individual 
decision that demands acknowledgment by every 
subject, and that is willed, therefore, independ- 
ently of our merely personal desires. It is an 
act of will which is meant as necessary for every 
subject, which ought to be acted by everybody : 
we call it duty. From a purely psychological 
standpoint, the will thought as object is deter- 
mined in any case, — the virtuous act as well as 
the crime, the nonsensical judgment as well as 
the wise one. From the critical standpoint of 
reality, the special will decision is necessary if it 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 173 

belongs to the very nature of will, binds every 
will, not by natural law, but by obligation ; and 
it can be and is unnecessary if it is merely 
personal arbitrariness. 

This doubleness of duty and arbitrariness in 
our will repeats itself in every division of possible 
will activities, and there exist four such depart- 
ments of relations of will to the world, four 
possibilities of reacting on the world. First, 
the subject may change the objects of the world 
by his actions ; secondly, may decide for addi- 
tional supplements to the given objects ; thirdly, 
may transform the objects in his thought so that 
they form a connection ; and fourthly, may trans- 
form the objects so that they stand each for 
itself. If these four possible subjective acts are 
performed by the individual personal arbitrary 
will, they represent individual values. The ac- 
tions toward the world are then such changes of 
the objects as are useful and practical for our 
comfort ; the supplementations are then the play 
of our fancy and imagination ; the connections 
are then expressions of our hope or fear; the 
isolations, finally, are means to our personal 
enjoyment. These four functions may be carried 
out also as functions of the deeper, over-indi- 
vidual, necessary will; that is, as functions of 
duty. Those actions which alter and change 
the objective world are then moral actions ; the 
ideas which supplement the world make up re- 



174 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

ligion ; those transformations which bring out a 
connection between the objects of the world 
compose scientific truth ; and finally, those trans- 
formations which isolate the objects, so that 
they stand each for itself, form the domain of 
beauty. 

VI 

Truth and beauty thus represent duties, logical 
and aesthetical duties, just as morality represents 
ethical duties. We choose and form the physical 
axiom in science so, and not otherwise, because 
our will is bound by duty to do so ; that is, only 
that particular decision of our affirming will can 
demand acknowledgment by every subject ; and 
thus art chooses the forms and lines, the colors 
and curves, of the Sistine Madonna just so, and 
not otherwise, because only this decision of the 
creating will is as it ought to be, as duty pre- 
scribes, as it can demand that every willing 
subject ought to acknowledge it. Everything 
in this world is beautiful, and is a joy forever if 
it is so transformed that it does not suggest 
anything else than itself, that it contains all 
elements for the fulfillment of the whole in 
itself. We do not ask for the arms and legs of 
the person whose marble bust the artist gives 
us, and we do not ask for his complexion, either. 
We do not ask how the field and forest look 
outside of the frame of the landscape painting, 



PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 175 

and we do not ask what the persons in the 
drama have done before and will do after the 
story. Our works of art are not in our space 
and not in our time ; their frame is their own 
world, which they never transcend. Keal art 
makes us forget that the painting is only a piece 
of canvas, and that Hamlet is only an actor, and 
not the prince. We forget the connections, we 
abstract from all relations, we think of the object 
in itself; and wherever we do so, we proceed 
aesthetically. And if we enjoy the great works 
of art, the essential function is not the individ- 
ual enjoyment of our senses and feelings, like 
the enjoyment in eating and drinking ; no, it is 
the volitional acknowledgment of the will of the 
artist. We will with him ; and if we appreciate 
his work as beautiful, we acknowledge that it is 
as we feel that it ought to be ; that our will of 
thinking that particle of the world is lifted to its 
duties ; that we have transcended the sphere of 
merely personal arbitrariness and its desires and 
agreeable fulfillments ; that we have reached 
the sphere of over-individual values. Whoever 
understands art as will function believes in art 
and appreciates it as a world of duties ; psycho- 
logy has not to try to understand it as such, but 
to transform it into something else, into a set of 
objects which have causes and effects. Psycho- 
logy must destroy the deepest meaning of art, 
just as it disregards the deepest meaning of 



176 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

truth and morality, if it tries to present its view 
as the last word about our inner activities. 

And if art is thus a realization of duties which 
have their real meaning in this acknowledgment 
of the will, in what light should we see all these 
technical rules and prescriptions for facilitating 
in the child the production of artistic works, and 
for preventing him from making disagreeable 
drawings? Those rules and prescriptions remain 
quite good and valid. They do for real beauty 
and art just what the police and the prisons on 
the one side, the training of habits and manners 
on the other side, do for real morality. Nobody 
will underestimate the value of the fact that our 
children learn through training a thousand habits 
which keep them, as a matter of course, out of 
conflict with the laws, and that police and jails 
remind them again and again, Do not leave the 
safe tracks. Whoever lives a noble life, however, 
means by morality and duty something else and 
something higher. Habits and jails do not in- 
sure that in an important conflict of life, where 
personal interests stand against duty, the bad 
action may not triumph. Only a conscience 
which is penetrated by morality stands safe in 
all storms, and such a conscience is not brought 
out by technical prescriptions, nor by punishments 
and jails ; no, only by the obligatory power of 
will upon will, by the inspiring life of subjects 
we acknowledge, by the example of the heroes 



PSYCHOLOGY AND AKT 177 

of duty, that speaks directly from will to will, 
and for which we cannot substitute psychologi- 
cal training and police officers. And thus the 
duty of art. Do not believe that the easier pro- 
duction of a not disagreeable drawing means a 
positive gain for real art and beauty: it raises 
the standard, it uplifts the level of aesthetic pro- 
duction, just as the standard of moral behavior 
is lifted by the existence of a watchful police, 
and it is extremely important. Do not forget, 
however, that sesthetical life also needs not only 
the policeman's function, but above all the min- 
ister's and helper's function ; in other words, 
not technical rules, but duties ; not easy produc- 
tion, but convictions ; not knowledge of psy- 
chological effects, but belief in absolute values. 

This attitude becomes the more important as 
this whole view shows that the world of art is in 
no way subordinate to or less true than the world 
of science. The reality is neither that which 
the scientist describes nor that which the artist 
sketches ; both are transformations for a special 
purpose. The scientist, we have seen, trans- 
forms for the purpose of connection, and in that 
service he constructs atoms which exist nowhere 
but in his thought. The artist transforms in 
the interest of isolation, and in that service he 
constructs his drawings. The mechanical pro- 
cess of drawing as such is, of course, not art in 
itself ; it is the indifferent means of expression 



178 PSYCHOLOGY AND ART 

which can communicate science as well as art. 
Just as words can serve Shakespeare as well as 
Darwin, so lines and curves can serve the mathe- 
matician and the physicist as well as the artist ; 
the purpose alone separates the poet from the 
biologist, the scientist from the artist. And if 
art thus means a world which is exactly as true 
and valuable as the world of science, let us not 
forget that the school lesson in drawing means 
contact with this world of art, — that is, with 
the special spirit of aesthetic duties ; and that 
every drawing-teacher ought to be, not an 
sesthetical policeman only, but an inspiring be- 
liever in these sacred aesthetic duties. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 



A study of the relations between psychology 
and the science of history emphasizes necessarily 
the limits of psychology. I know quite well 
that the choice of such a subject easily suggests 
the suspicion of heresy; whoever asks eagerly 
for the limits of a science appears to the first 
glance in a hostile attitude towards it. To em- 
phasize its limiting boundaries means to restrain 
its rights and to lessen its freedom. It seems, 
indeed, almost an anti-psychological undertaking 
for any one to say to this young science, which 
is so full of the spirit of enterprise : Keep within 
the bounds of your domain. But you remember 
the word of Kant : " It is not augmentation, but 
deformation of the sciences, if we efface their 
limits." Kant is speaking of logic, but at 
present his word seems to be for no field truer 
than for psychology. Psychology, it seems to 
me, encouraged by its quick triumphs over its 
old-fashioned metaphysical rival, to-day moves 
instinctively towards an expansionistic policy. 
A psychological imperialism which dictates laws 



180 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

to the whole world of inner experience seems 
often to be the goal. But sciences are not like 
the domiciles of nations ; their limits cannot be 
changed by mere agreement. The presupposi- 
tions with which a science starts decide for all 
time as to the possibilities of its outer extension. 
The botanists may resolve to-morrow that from 
now on they will study the movements of the 
stars also ; it is their private matter to choose 
whether they want to be botanists only or also 
astronomers, but they can never decide that 
astronomy shall become in future a part of 
botany, supposing that they do not claim the 
Milky Way as a big vegetable. Every exten- 
sion beyond the sharp limits which are deter- 
mined by the logical presuppositions can thus be 
only the triumph of confusion, and the ultimate 
arbitration, which is the function of episte- 
mology, must always decide against it. It is 
thus love and devotion for psychology which 
demands that its energies be not wasted by the 
hopeless task of transgressions into other fields. 

Philosophers and psychologists are mostly will- 
ing to acknowledge such a discriminative atti- 
tude when the relations between psychology and 
the normative sciences, ethics, logic, aesthetics, are 
in question. They know that a mere descrip- 
tion and causal explanation of ethical, sesthetical, 
and logical mental facts in spite of its legitimate 
relative value cannot in itself be substituted for 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 181 

the doctrines of obligation. The line of demar- 
cation thus separates with entire logical sharp- 
ness the duties from the facts, the duties which 
have to be appreciated in their validity as ideals 
for the will, and the facts which have to be 
analyzed and explained in their physical or psy- 
chical existence as objects of perception. But 
can we overlook the symptoms of growing oppo- 
sition against the undiscriminative treatment of 
the world of facts in the empirical sciences? 
The creed of those who believe in such uni- 
formity is simple enough : the universe is made 
up of physical and psychical processes, and it 
is the purpose of science to discover their ele- 
ments and their laws ; we may differentiate and 
classify the sciences with regard to the different 
objects which we analyze or with regard to the 
different processes the laws of which we study, 
but there cannot exist in the world anything 
which does not find a suitable place in a system 
in which all special sciences are departments of 
physics or of psychology. In a period of natu- 
ralistic thinking like that of the Darwinistic age 
the intellectual conscience may be fascinated and 
hypnotized by the triumphs of such atomizing 
and law-seeking thought even to the point of 
forgetting all doubts and contradictions. But 
the pendulum of civilization begins to swing in 
the other direction. The mere decomposition of 
the world has not satisfied the deep demand for 



182 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

an inner understanding of the world ; the dis- 
covery of the causal laws has not stilled the thirst 
for emotional values, and there has come a chill 
with the feeling that all the technical improve- 
ment which surrounds us is a luxury which does 
not make life either better or worthier of the 
struggle. The idealistic impulses have come 
to a new life everywhere in art and science 
and politics and society and religion; histori- 
cal and philosophical thinking has revived and 
rushes to the foreground. We begin to remem- 
ber again what naturalism too easily forgets, 
that the interests of life have not to do with 
causes and effects, but with purposes and means, 
that in life we feel ourselves as units and as free 
agents, bound by culture and not only by na- 
ture, factors in a system of history and not only 
atoms in a mechanism. 

Such a general reaction demands its expres- 
sion in the world of science too, and there can- 
not be any surprise if psychology has to stand 
the first attack. The naturalistic study of the 
physical facts may not be less antagonistic to 
such idealistic demands, and yet it is the de- 
composition of the psychical facts which op- 
presses us most immediately in our instinctive 
strife for the rights of the personality. The 
antithesis becomes thus most pointed in the con- 
flict between psychology and history, and it 
seems to me that only two possibilities are open. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 183 

One possibility is that these sciences stay yoked 
together, the one forcing the other to follow its 
path. Either of two events may then happen. 
Either psychology will remain as hitherto the 
stronger one; in which case history must follow 
the paths of psychological analysis and be satis- 
fied with sociological laws ; every effort of history 
which goes beyond that is then unscientific, and 
the works of our great historians must seek shel- 
ter under the roof of art. Or — and this second 
case has all odds in favor of it — the belief 
in the unity of personality will become stronger 
than the confidence in science, which merely de- 
composes, and psychology will be subordinated 
to the historical view of man. That is possible 
under a hundred forms, but the final result must 
always be the same, the ruin of real psychology. 
I think this undermining of psychology with 
the tools of history is to-day in eager progress. 
Here belong, of course, all the most modern 
attempts to supplement the regular analyzing 
psychology by a pseudo-psychology which by 
principle considers the mental life as a unity 
and asks not about its constitution but about its 
meaning. Whether authors, half unconsciously, 
alternate with these two views from chapter to 
chapter, or whether they demand systematically 
that both kinds of psychology be acknowledged, 
makes no essential difference. Both forms are 
characteristic for a period of transition; both 



184 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

must lead in the end to giving up fully the 
analyzing view, to shifting the results of such 
analysis over to physiology, and thus to confin- 
ing psychology entirely to the anti-causal cate- 
gories, that is, to denying psychology altogether. 
Such turnings of the scientific spirit are slow, 
but if history and psychology remain chained up 
together, the symptoms of the future are too 
clear : there is no hope for psychology. 

But there is a second alternative open. The 
chain which forces psychology and history to 
move together may be broken ; the one may be 
acknowledged as fully independent of the other. 
What appears as a conflict of contradictory 
statements may then become the mutual sup- 
plementation of two partial truths, just as a 
body may appear very different from the geo- 
metrical, from the physical, and from the chemi- 
cal points of view, while each one gives us truth. 
To those who have followed the recent develop- 
ment of epistemological discussion, especially in 
Germany, it is a well-known fact that this logi- 
cal separation of history and psychology is, in- 
deed, the demand of some of the best students 
of logic. They claim that the scientific inter- 
est in the facts can and must take two abso- 
lutely different directions : we are interested 
either in the single fact as such or in the laws 
under which it stands, and thus we have two 
groups of sciences which have nothing to do 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 185 

with each other, sciences which describe the 
isolated facts and sciences which seek their laws. 
A leading logician baptizes the first, therefore, 
idiographic sciences, the latter nomothetic sci- 
ences ; idiographic is history ; nomothetic are 
physics and psychology. Psychology gives gen- 
eral facts which are always true, but concerning 
which it has not to ask whether they are realized 
anywhere or at any time ; history refers to the 
special single fact only, without any relation to 
general facts. 

II 

I consider this logical separation as a liberat- 
ing deed, not only because it is the only way 
for psychology to escape its ruin through the 
interference of an historically thinking idealism, 
and also not only because the value and unity 
and freedom of the personality which history 
preaches can now be followed up without inter- 
ference on the part of psychology, but because, 
independent of any practical results, it seems to 
me the necessary outcome of epistemological 
reflection. And yet the arguments which have 
led to this separation appear to me mistaken and 
untenable in every respect. I agree heartily 
with the decision, but I absolutely reject the 
motives. No antithesis is possible between sci- 
ences which study the isolated facts and sciences 
which generalize ; such a methodological differ- 



186 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

ence does not exist. We shall see that it must 
be replaced by a difference of another kind, but 
the end must be the same : psychology and his- 
tory must never come together again. To criti- 
cise the one way of attaining this end and to 
illuminate the other new way which I propose is 
the purpose of the following considerations. 

We must proceed at first critically ; what is 
the truth of the view which contrasts idiographic 
and nomothetic sciences? At the first glance 
the importance of the discrimination seems so 
evident that it appears hard to understand how 
it could ever have been overlooked. It seems a 
matter of course that the empirical sciences can 
ask either about the general facts of reality, the 
laws which are true always and everywhere and 
which do not say what happened on a special 
place and in a special time, or on the other 
hand about the single facts which are character- 
ized just by their uniqueness. We may be in- 
terested in the physical and chemical laws of 
fire, but our interest in the one great fire which 
destroyed Moscow has an absolutely different 
logical source, and if we extend our historical 
interest from the physical to the psychical side, 
and investigate the stream of associations which 
passed through the mind of Napoleon during the 
days of that fire, we have again an absolutely 
different kind of interest from that of the psy- 
chologist who studies the laws of association 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 187 

and inhibition, which are true for every mortal. 
How small from a logical standpoint appears the 
difference between the search for physical laws 
and the search for psychological laws compared 
with the unbridgable chasm between the search 
for laws and the inquiry for special facts which 
happened once ! And this difference grows if 
we consider that all our feelings and emotions 
refer to the special single object, not to any 
laws, that, above all, the personalities with which 
we come in contact come in question for us just 
in their singleness, and that we ourselves feel 
the value of our life and the meaning of our 
responsibility in the uniqueness of the acts by 
which we mark our individual role in the his- 
tory of mankind. These arguments of recent 
epistemological discussions will easily find the 
ear of the multitude. Common sense, which 
demands for itself the prerogative of being in- 
consistent, will probably hesitate only at the 
unavoidable postulate of this standpoint, that 
also the development of our solar system, of our 
earth, of our flora and fauna, belongs then to 
history and not to natural science, as they de- 
scribe a process which happened once, and not 
a law. 

I may begin my criticism at the periphery of 
the subject, moving slowly to the centre. I 
claim first that all natural sciences, of which 
psychology is one, do not seek laws only, but set 



188 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

forth also judgments about the existence of ob- 
jects. Of course, we can make the arbitrary 
decision that we acknowledge the natural sci- 
ences as such only so far as they give eternal 
laws without reference to their realization in a 
special place or in a special time, while any 
judgment about the existence here or there, 
now or then, has to be housed under the roof 
of history. The sciences as they practically are 
would then be mixtures of historical and natu- 
ralistic statements, the historical factor diminish- 
ing the more, the more abstract the science, 
reaching its minimum in pure mechanics. Such 
decision has only recently found able defense, 
but do we not destroy, by its acceptance, the 
whole meaning of natural science? Are the 
laws for themselves alone still of any scientific 
interest at all ? Why do we care at all for such 
general laws, as the law of causality, the most 
general of them, which embraces all the others, 
is included already in the presuppositions of sci- 
ence, and thus anticipated beforehand ? When 
formal logic or mathematics deals with A and B 
and C, they state valid relations without asking 
whether A, B or C is given anywhere or at any 
time, even without excluding the possibility that 
their real existence may be impossible. The 
scientific judgments of physics and psychology, 
on the other hand, have lost all their meaning 
if we deprive them of the presupposition that 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 189 

objects which prove the validity of such laws 
have real existence in the world of experience. 

We can construct well-founded physiological 
laws also for the organism of the centaur and 
psychological laws for the minds of nixes and 
water fairies, but neither attempt belongs with- 
in the system of science. The claim of exist- 
entiality is not explicitly expressed in the for- 
mulation of scientific knowledge, not because it 
is unessential, but because it is a matter of 
course. The larger the circle for which the 
law is valid, the more we find these included 
judgments of reality deprived of their reference 
to special local and temporal data, but even in 
the most general propositions of mechanics such 
judgments are tacitly included. The question 
is not whether the objects with which the laws 
of mechanics deal have real existence from a 
philosophical point of view ; certainly they have 
not. The important point is that mechanics 
by its laws tries at the same time to make us 
believe that even the atoms have existence. On 
the other hand, the existential judgment must be- 
come the more detailed the more special the law 
is, that is, the more complicated the conditions 
of its realization. If the psychologist states the 
laws of the feelings, he claims that it is not true 
that only men without feelings exist ; he claims 
that men with feelings have reality too. If he 
gives us the more special laws of ethical feelings, 



190 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

he claims that experience knows men with ethi- 
cal emotion. If he goes on with his specializa- 
tion of the psychical laws, claiming that under 
special conditions the ethical emotion of obedi- 
ence to the state comes to inhibit the desire for 
life, he tells us that this really happened. His 
psychological law becomes finally only still more 
detailed if he lays it down that under such and 
such conditions obedience to the state discharges 
itself in the drinking of a hemlock potion in 
spite of antagonistic suggestions of escape from 
philosophical friends. It is a psychological law, 
and yet it claims at the same time that all this 
once at least really happened, while the com- 
plication of conditions practically excludes the 
possibility of its happening more than once in 
the world of our experience. 

Of course, it remains a law of general char- 
acter with regard to absolute space and absolute 
time ; when all conditions including our solar 
system and all the events on the earth are given 
once more in infinity, then Socrates necessarily 
must drink once more the poisoned cup. But 
in the limited space and time of our experience 
the conditions for the realization of such a psy- 
chological law can have been given only once, 
and that they really once were given is decidedly 
claimed and thus silently reported by the law. 
If our opponents maintain that the naturalistic 
sciences need as supplement an historical descrip- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 191 

tion of one special stage of the world to give a 
foothold for the working of the eternal laws, we 
can thus reject this external help for the expla- 
nation of the world, as the laws themselves fur- 
nish all that we need. The system of the laws is 
at the same time a full and graduated system of 
existential propositions with regard to the limited 
space and time of our experience. If ever and 
anywhere in the empirical universe a molecule 
had moved otherwise or another thought had 
passed through a consciousness, then the system 
of laws, thought in ideal perfection, would have 
demanded a change. Our physics and psycho- 
logy presuppose and assert the real existence of 
exactly our world. They do not seek the laws 
with the intention of neglecting and ignoring 
the special facts. 

Ill 

The separation of the single facts from the 
general facts is thus untenable, because the ex- 
planatory law includes the description ; but we 
can also emphasize the other side of this mutual 
relation : every description includes explanation, 
every assertion of a special fact demands refer- 
ence to the general facts. A description has a 
logical value only if it points towards a law. 
We describe a process by the help of conceptions 
which are worked up from the general facts, 
common to a group of objects, and these general 



192 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

conceptions are the more valuable for the pur- 
poses of description the more their content is a 
condensed representation of real objective con- 
nections. Descriptions in popular language 
make use of conceptions which are deduced from 
superficial similarity, but every new insight into 
physical and psychological laws gives to these 
general conceptions a more and more valuable 
shape. The history of science is the steady 
development of the means of description ; there 
is no description which by its use of conceptions 
does not aim at working out the laws. Thus, 
far from the trivial belief that the law is merely 
a description of facts, we ought not to forget 
that the description of facts involves the laws 
and is only another form of their expression. 
To describe a physical thing as a group of atoms 
or an idea as a group of sensations demands the 
whole knowledge of the psychological and me- 
chanical laws and condenses in its conceptions 
the progress of science. To separate the descrip- 
tive report from the explaining apperception is 
thus again impossible. 

It might appear that this does not hold for all 
kinds of description ; we communicate with one 
another in practical life without relying on gen- 
eral conceptions. But our communication then 
is no description. Any mode of personal ex- 
pression, gestures or tears, may tell us what is 
going on in the mind of another without refer- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 193 

ence to psychological laws. But the fact is that 
they give no description either; they give a 
suggestion. The words of practical life, the 
words of the poet, and, as we may add at once, 
the words of the historian, work like such move- 
ments of expression ; they make every mental 
vibration resound in us, because they force us 
unintentionally or with conscious art to follow 
the suggestion and to imitate the mental experi- 
ence. The rhythm and the shade of the words 
may then be substituted for logical exactitude, 
and interjections may have deeper influence than 
complete judgments, but all that is decidedly no 
description, as a description demands a commu- 
nication of the elements. Such a suggestion 
allows us an understanding of the meaning, but 
gives us no knowledge of the constitution. 
Where a single object really has to be described, 
there conceptions and laws are inevitable, and 
the historian cannot make an exception. 

But just this fact, that description and expla- 
nation cannot be separated and that the concep- 
tion includes the law, has opened in recent 
philosophical discussions a new way of thought 
which also seems to lead to those claims which 
we rejected. Granted, it is said, that every 
description presupposes generalizing abstractions, 
but such abstraction must then lead us away 
from the endless manifoldness of the reality. 
Every scientific description deals with physical 



194 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

or psychological abstractions; does that not 
mean that we need still another kind of treat- 
ment which does justice to the existing richness 
and fullness of the real single fact ? If we give 
this mission to history, we acknowledge that its 
communications would not be ordinary descrip- 
tions, but in any case we should again have the 
separated camps with the antithesis: Manifold- 
ness and abstraction, single fact and general 
fact. But the presupposition is wrong; the 
manifoldness of the reality is not endless and 
the abstracting conceptions are not at all unfit 
to do justice to the richness of the single fact. 
The single conception abstracts, but the connec- 
tion of conceptions in the sentence reconstructs 
again. On the other hand, whatever is the 
possible object of perception and discrimination 
must be the possible object of descriptive deter- 
mination. Whether the task of a complete con- 
ceptional description is difficult or not is no 
question of principle ; impossible it is not. The 
ability to perceive differences is even inferior 
compared with the power to separate the differ- 
ences conceptionally, and the abstracting de- 
scription of science must, therefore, frequently 
increase and not decrease the manifoldness of 
the object. We know about the objects more 
than we perceive ; above all, the description can 
never leave behind it a perceivable remainder 
which from its too great manifoldness excludes 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 195 

description. The full variety of the single facts 
thus belongs just as much as the most general 
law to the physical and psychological sciences ; 
the antithesis psychology and history as coincid- 
ing with the antithesis abstraction and mani- 
foldness of reality is then impossible. That 
history stands, indeed, nearer to reality than any 
psychology we shall later fully acknowledge, 
but, as we shall see, for very different reasons ; 
history abstracts, we shall see, not less than 
psychology, and psychology is interested in the 
variety of the facts just as much as is history. 

v IV 

This brings us to our central arguments: 
Every science considers the single facts in their 
relations to other facts, works towards connec- 
tion, towards generalities. Science means con- 
nection and nothing else, and history also aims 
at general facts, or it cannot hope for a place in 
the system of science. Does that mean that it is 
valueless to consider the single fact as it stands 
for itself, isolated and separated from everything 
else? Certainly not; the isolation is not less 
valuable than the connection, but it never forms 
a science ; it is the task of art. The single fact 
belongs to art and not to history ; history has to 
do with the general facts. That is the thesis 
which I must interpret and defend. One point, 
of course, is clear before the discussion. If we 



196 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

maintain that history has also to work up its 
material with respect to the general facts and 
not with regard to the single facts, then it is 
evident that there is in the deepest principle of 
the inquiry no methodological difference between 
physics and psychology on the one side and 
history on the other. But we insisted that an 
important difference does exist. The difference 
must then be not in the kind of treatment, but 
in the material itself. To be sure, there cannot 
be a physical or psychical object in the universe 
which would not be possible material for psy- 
chology or physics; if history deals with a 
material which is different from the possible 
objects of those empirical sciences, then it must 
deal with facts which differ from the physical 
and psychical objects in their kind of existence; 
in short, the difference between psychology and 
history is not a methodological but an ontological 
one. 

We must then ask what kind of existence 
belongs to the material with which physics and 
psychology deal, and how it is related to reality ; 
above all, how far reality offers still another 
kind of facts which could be the substance of 
other sciences. Keality means to us here the 
immediate experience which we live through. 
This immediate truth of life may be transformed 
and remoulded in theories and sciences, and 
these remodelings of reality may be highly valu- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 197 

able for special purposes of life ; we may even 
reach finally a point of reconstruction from 
which the subjective experience appears as an 
illusion and the supplementation stands as the 
only truth. Yet the importance of such con- 
structions must not make us forget that we have 
then left reality behind us. Our doubting and 
remoulding itself belongs to the reality for 
which its products can never be substituted. 
And this primary reality can, of course, never 
be reached when we start from the finished 
theories of the physical or psychological sciences. 
Whether we pretend that the world is a content 
of our consciousness, a system of psychological 
ideas, or whether we start from the mechanical 
universe and consider experience as effect of the 
outer world on the consciousness, or whether we 
confuse the two and call the world a product of 
the brain, it is all equally misleading if we seek 
the reality, as each view presupposes equally the 
psychological or physical constructions. It is 
then, of course, also impossible for us to reach 
the less remoulded primary experience by going 
backward through the genetic development of 
the individual or of the race to an earlier simpler 
stage of experience. Just this genetic tracing 
backward fully presupposes the categories of the 
psychological view ; we must have already con- 
sidered our own inner life as a complex combi- 
nation of elements before it has a meaning to 



198 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

call the mental life of the child or of the animal 
less complex ; the starting point of the genetic 
development is thus itself an artificial construc- 
tion which lies further away from the primary 
experience. 

If we thus escape all theories and stand firm 
against the suggestions which psychology and 
physics plentifully bring to us, then we find in 
the reality nothing of ideas or of mechanical 
substances, neither consciousness nor a connected 
universe. The reality we experience does not 
know the antithesis of psychical and physical 
objects, but in the primary stage merely the 
antithesis subject and object. We feel our 
personal reality in our subjective attitudes, in 
our will acts which we do not perceive but which 
we live through, and with the same immediacy 
we acknowledge other personalities as subjects 
of will. They too are not objects which we 
merely perceive, but we acknowledge them, by 
our feeling, as subjects with whom we agree or 
disagree and whose reality is thus not less cer- 
tain than our own. Our acts as subjects are 
directed towards objects which in reality exist 
only as such objects of will, that is, as values. 
They are our ends and means, our tools and pur- 
poses, and nothing is to us real that is not called 
to be selected or rejected, to be favored or dis- 
missed. Subjective acts of will and objects of 
will form the reality, the whole reality, nothing 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 199 

lies outside, and nothing is valid beyond this 
"world of will relations ; and even if we form 
judgments about objects which we think as 
independent of the will, this judgment and this 
thought itself is an act of will working towards 
a purpose. 

As soon as we begin to bring order into the 
manifoldness of this real world, the subjective 
acts as well as the objects divide themselves into 
two groups, — those of individual character and 
those which are common to all, over-individual. 
This division is not a result of counting whether 
several subjects or by chance only one subject 
have made the decision or appreciated the object: 
it is a question of intention merely. My act is 
over-individual if it is willed with the meaning 
that it belongs to every subject which I acknow- 
ledge, and my object is over-individual in so far 
as I consider it as a possible object of attitude 
for every subject. My over-individual will-act is 
that factor of reality which we call duty ; every 
duty lies in us as subjects, as our own deepest 
will, and yet as more than our individual deci- 
sion. The over-individual objects are those 
which we call physical; the individual objects 
are the psychical ones ; we must only not for- 
get that these physical and psychical objects 
are in reality not in question as independent ob- 
jects of perception, but are always related to the 
will ; they are not contents of consciousness and 



200 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

mechanical bodies in a continuous space, but 
suggestions which have a meaning, things which 
have a use. We find thus four factors of real- 
ity, beyond whose validity a constructive meta- 
physics alone can go. Metaphysics may ask 
whether the individual and over-individual acts 
do not blend in an absolute subject and whether 
the objects are not posited by such a subject 
of higher order ; epistemology must be satisfied 
with the more modest task of settling how we 
deal with this reality in our scientific or aesthetic 
knowledge. Reality itself is, of course, neither 
art nor science, but life. Art and science must 
be thus transformations of the material which 
life offers to us, while these transformations 
themselves are acts of the subjects and thus 
belonging to those will-formations which claim 
for themselves an over-individual character, cre- 
ating the values of beauty and truth. 

V 

The acts which lead from life to art and 
science are thus for epistemology free acts of 
that subjectivity which we find in ourselves by 
immediate feeling, and which we acknowledge 
in others by an understanding of their proposi- 
tions and suggestions ; they are not functions of 
the psychophysical organism, not psychophysical 
processes, as we must have reached already the 
artificial reconstruction of science before the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 201 

subject is replaced by that object among other 
objects, the psychophysical personality. Scien- 
tific and sesthetic acts are not the only functions 
of the real subject ; the ethical and others stand 
coordinated, but we are concerned here only 
with the two functions which do not aim to 
change and to improve the world, but to rethink 
it in beautiful or truthful creations. It seems 
to me now that the two attitudes are in every 
respect antagonistic ; to express their direction 
in a short formula, I should say science connects 
the factors of reality; art, on the other hand, 
isolates them. The material of science and of 
art is then the same, though treated by a differ- 
ent method. Both can deal with all the four 
factors of reality, with individual acts and over- 
individual acts, with individual objects and over- 
individual objects. Life does not isolate fully, 
and gives no complete connection ; whatever we 
turn to with our will has features which lead us 
further and further to ever new interests ; life 
does not let us sink into the one alone — we 
rush beyond it to new realities. And life does 
not give connections beyond the immediate 
needs of practical purposes in the narrow circle 
of chance experience. Wherever is full isolation 
of single facts there is beauty, wherever truth 
there must be full connection. 

The assertion that every isolated fact in its 
singleness means beauty has for us here only 



202 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

the character of a critical argument and is not 
for itself an object of our discussion. It has for 
us merely the negative purpose of proving that 
the singleness cannot be characteristic of his- 
tory. We cannot here defend this assertion by 
detailed discussion; we have only to elucidate 
its meaning. Certainly the real life, too, brings 
us pulses of experience in which our will is cap- 
tivated by the given experience, satisfied with 
the object in itself or in the acknowledgment of 
other subjective acts ; then we have the beauty 
of nature, the beauty of forms and of land- 
scapes, of love and of friendship. Of course, 
it is only an exception when life offers to us in 
the untransformed reality such complete beauty ; 
it remains the duty of art to change the world 
till everything is eliminated that leads the sub- 
ject beyond the single experience, and the will 
can rest in the single fact. The world of ob- 
jects is thus transformed in painting and sculp- 
ture, the world of subjective acts remoulded in 
poetry. The sentiment or the conflict which 
the poet suggests to us, the bust or the land- 
scape which the artist brings before our eye, is 
severed from the practical world ; as long as 
anything connects it with the background of the 
daily world it may be useful or inspiring or in- 
structive, but it is not beautiful. The poet pro- 
jects his work into an ideal past ; the painter 
cuts an ideal space out of the reality, and the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 203 

sculptor fills an ideal space, not the space of our 
surrounding, to take care thus that the acts and 
objects may not link into our real world, may 
never become causes for outer effects, motives 
for actions, or centres for associations which lie 
beyond the frame. 

We ought not to become skeptical in regard 
to this point on account of the overhasty gen- 
eralizations in which empirical psychology mostly 
characterizes the sesthetic act as rich in asso- 
ciations. The epistemological problem we are 
discussing cannot be settled by psychology, yet 
as soon as the facts are expressed in the terms 
of psychological language they cannot possibly 
assert the opposite of the epistemological truth. 
But there is no reason for such a conflict, as 
psychology is undoubtedly in the wrong. The 
psychological claim is based on the general theory 
that all pleasant mental states represent an in- 
crease of activity, and with it an increase of 
associations, while all unpleasant states are 
marked by a decrease of activity and lack of 
associations. I think that is wrong; there are 
different kinds of increase and different kinds 
of decrease in both ideas and actions. The an- 
tithesis pleasure and displeasure does not at all 
coincide with increase and decrease if we do not 
arbitrarily select such emotions as joy on the 
one and grief on the other side. Increase of 
activity characterizes pleasant and unpleasant 



204 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

states, only in the pleasant states it produces 
action of the extensors, in the unpleasant states 
action of the flexors. In the same way decrease 
of activity can have a double type : it can have 
its ground in the absence of stimulations, and 
this is, indeed, characteristic of some unpleasant 
states ; but the lack of outer action can have its 
ground also in the fact that every motor impulse 
goes to the antagonistic muscles equally. This 
increase of tonicity without possible action is 
characteristic for one pleasant state above all, 
the aesthetic one. The increase and decrease of 
associations is here, as always, parallel with the 
motor impulses. Here also increase of associa- 
tions is essential for some pleasant states, but 
for some unpleasant ones too, only, like muscle 
activity, it is in antagonistic directions, in the 
one case turning to the future, in the other case 
falling back to the past. And the same double- 
ness is to be noted in the decrease of associa- 
tions ; in some unpleasant states the decrease 
comes from a mere lack of ideational impulses, 
in some pleasant states from the fascination 
which leads every ideational impulse again to 
the object itself, so that no thought can lead 
beyond it. This is again true, above all, for the 
aesthetic state. The beautiful object includes all 
that it suggests in itself, and where we connect 
we sin against the spirit of beauty. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 205 

VI 

By the contrast with art the fullest light falls 
on the process of science ; every step towards 
science leads in the opposite direction. The in- 
complete connections of life are severed by art, 
i but made complete by science, while the material 
is the same. We had four groups of facts in 
reality, and we must thus have four groups of 
sciences which bring systematic connections into 
the four different fields. We have the science 
of the over-individual objects, that is, physics ; 
secondly, the science of the individual objects, 
that is, psychology ; thirdly, the sciences of the 
over-individual will-acts, that is, the normative 
sciences ; and last, not least, the sciences of the 
individual will-acts, that is, the historical sci- 
ences. Physics and psychology have thus to do 
with objects ; history and the normative systems, 
ethics, logic, aesthetics, deal with will-acts. Psy- 
chology and history have thus absolutely differ- 
ent material ; the one can never deal with the 
substance of the other, and thus they are sepa- 
rated by a chasm, but their method is the same. 
Both connect their material ; both consider the 
single experience under the point of view of the 
totality, working from the special facts towards 
the general facts, from the experience towards 
the system. And yet the difference of material 
must, in spite of the equality of the methodo- 



206 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

logical process, produce absolutely different kinds 
of systems of science. We must consider again 
from the standpoint of real life how the connec- 
tion of objects is different from the connection 
of attitudes, and how the purposes of the sys- 
tematizing reconstruction are different in the 
two cases. 

We and the other subjects have objects which 
are in reality, as we have seen, objects of our 
will. Why have we an interest in considering 
the objects from a scientific standpoint, that is, 
in systematized connection ? If we do so, it 
must serve, of course, a special purpose in our 
real life. The purpose is clear. We cannot do 
the duties of our life, that is, we cannot act on 
the objects, if we do not know what to expect 
from them with regard to the reality which we 
prepare, and we call the reality which we can 
still prepare the future. We must ask, there- 
fore, what we have to expect for the future from 
the objects alone, that is, from the objects thought 
as if they were independent from the subjective 
will reaction. The answer to this question as to 
our justified expectations is the system of physi- 
cal and psychological sciences. To reach this 
end we must think the objects, the individual or 
over-individual ones, as if they were no longer 
objects of a will, as if the subject were deprived 
of its real activity and were a merely passive per- 
ceiving subject the objects of which are thus 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 207 

definitely cut away from the will. Our interest 
was to determine their influence on the future. 
We thus consider every object as the cause of 
an expected effect, and call those characteristics 
of the object which determine our expectation of 
the effect its elements. Physics and psychology 
thus look on their objects as complexes of ele- 
ments. It is the task of science to reconstruct 
and to transform the objects till each is con- 
ceived as such a combination of elements that 
the effects to be expected can be fully deter- 
mined from the elements. In this service grew 
up the atom doctrine in physics and the sensa- 
tion doctrine in psychology v Each object is 
thus linked into a causal system ; each is con- 
sidered not as that which it really is, but as a 
complex of constructed factors which are substi- 
tuted for the purpose of the causal connection, 
and each is in question in its relation to all the 
others. The world thus becomes a system of 
causally linked objects which can be described 
by their elements, while these elements them- 
selves are chosen from the point of view of 
explanation by causality. The determination of 
the effects by means of the elementary causes is 
expressed by the laws which give the rules for 
our expectations. We can say thus that physics 
and psychology may very well consider any spe- 
cial facts, and, as we have seen, they certainly 
do not ignore the special facts at all, but they 



208 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

consider them with regard to the causal law, 
and the laws as types of causal connections are 
thus the only general facts towards which the 
systematized study of objects can lead us. 

Quite different is the systematic connection of 
the subjective will-attitudes ; we may abstract 
here at first from the over-individual attitudes 
and concentrate our interest on the individual 
will-acts. In psychology the will - attitude as 
such, as act of the real subject, cannot have any 
place whatever ; psychology deals with objects ; 
the subjective attitude is never an object ; it is 
never perceived ; it is experienced by immediate 
feeling and must be understood and interpreted, 
but not described and explained. If psychology 
wishes to treat of the will, the psychophysical 
organism must be substituted for the real subject, 
and thus the will be considered as a process in 
the world of objects. The description of any 
known will-acts as psychophysical functions, that 
is, as illustrations of psychological laws, thus as 
a matter of course belongs to psychology, and if 
the psychologist should analyze into psycho- 
physical elements and explain as causally deter- 
mined all will-acts and human functions of the 
last three thousand years, he would not tran- 
scend the limits of psychology. It would be a 
very useless psychological undertaking, but it 
would be such and not history. History starts 
from and deals with the real subjective will-acts 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 209 

which cannot be found in the world of psycho- 
physical objects. 

Our personal life in its political, economical, 
religious, scientific, aesthetic, technical, and prac- 
tical aspects is a manifoldness of will-attitudes 
and acknowledgments. We live in the midst of 
a variety of political and social, technical and 
practical institutions, but no institution means 
anything else than expectations and demands 
which reach our will, and suggestions towards 
which we take attitudes. State and church, 
legal community and social set, what else are 
they but will-attitudes which we acknowledge 
and which are, therefore, never understood in 
their real meaning if they are considered as de- 
scribable objects, but which must be interpreted 
and appreciated as subjective will-relations, striv- 
ing towards purposes and ends. And to under- 
stand all the technical and practical institutions 
which civilization brings to us means again not 
to describe or explain them, but to interpret 
them as will-suggestions to be imitated. The 
machine and the book, the law and the poem, 
are not physical and psychical objects for our 
interests as living men, but suggestions and de- 
mands for the understanding of the intentions 
and attitudes of other subjects which we can 
enter into only by taking an imitating or reject- 
ing attitude, thus reaching will by will. All our 
knowing and believing, our enjoying and re- 



210 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

specting — as long as we abstract from their 
over-individual values — all our education and 
civilization, our politics and our professional 
work, is such a complex of real affirmations and 
negations, demands and inhibitions, agreements 
and disagreements, which have to be understood 
and felt and interpreted, but which are not 
touched in their reality if merely their psycho- 
physical substitutions are analyzed and causally 
explained. To be a Chinese or a Mohammedan, 
a symbolist or an Hegelian or an atomist, means 
to be the subject of special complexes of will- 
attitudes and nothing else. If, for instance, we 
substitute the race for the state, then, of course, 
we have objects before us and no longer subjec- 
tive attitudes, but then we deal with biological 
conceptions and no longer with history. 

VII 

The manifoldness of will-acts the totality of 
which forms my real personality thus refers in 
every act to the will acts and attitudes of other 
subjects which I acknowledge or oppose, imitate 
or overcome. These demands and suggestions 
of others are not in question in my life as causes 
or partial causes of my will ; they have not to 
be sought in the interest of a causal connection ; 
they are merely conditions which I as subject of 
attitude and acts presuppose for my free decision, 
and which are thus logically contained in it ; the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 211 

connection is, therefore, not a causal, but merely 
a teleological one. The endless world of will- 
acts which stands thus in teleologically determin- 
ing relation to our own will-attitudes forms the 
only material of history. 

The material is, of course, unlimited. If 
every act of ours means an attitude towards acts 
of others which we must try to understand, it 
is clear that those others are understood only 
if their acts again are interpreted as attitudes 
towards the propositions and demands and sug- 
gestions of others, and so on and on. Every 
will-act is thus ideally related to an unlimited 
manifoldness of other acts, just as the movement 
of every grain of sand is causally related to every 
molecule in the universe. It is the unique task 
of history as a science to work out and make 
complete this teleological system of individual 
will-relations, thus to bring out the connections 
between our acts and all the acts which we must 
acknowledge as somehow teleologically influen- 
cing our own. While physics and psychology 
thus produce a connected system of causes and 
effects, linking all objects which stand in con- 
nection with our objects, history follows up all 
the subjective acts which stand in will-relation to 
our subjective attitudes. 

Physics and psychology, as we have seen, 
reach this end through striving towards laws 
and causality ; that, of course, cannot be the 



212 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

way of history. The objects interested us only 
as factors which influence the future, and the 
laws by which we have connected them have 
satisfied this expectant interest. The subjects, 
on the other hand, do not interest us primarily 
as causes of effects. Of course, we are able to 
consider them also as objects which produce 
effects, and that aspect may become important to 
us in many practical respects ; psychophysics will 
fully satisfy this kind of interest. And in the 
same way we may look on the development of 
peoples with an interest in what we have to ex- 
pect from them ; they are then sociological or- 
ganisms, the laws of which we study ; but such 
study is not history. The aim of the real his- 
torian is not to prophesy the future. Peoples 
never learn from history, and the forgotten doc- 
trine that we ought to study history to find out 
what we have to expect from the future stands 
on the same level with its contemporary, the 
doctrine that it is the purpose of art to instruct 
us and to make us better. No, the historian 
makes us understand the system of will-attitudes 
to which our individual will is related. That, 
indeed, alone, is our primary interest in the will- 
acts of other subjects; we want to understand 
them, not to analyze them into elements ; we 
want to interpret their meanings and not to cal- 
culate their future. The objects awake our ex- 
pectations ; the subjects interest our appreciation, 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 213 

and all that we want to know about them is with 
what other attitudes they agree or disagree. We 
thus have the logical aim, to consider them in 
their relations to all other will-attitudes and to 
work out the system of these connections; that 
is, to consider the institutions which are the 
representatives of will-suggestions, together with 
the personalities themselves, as links of this end- 
less chain of will-relations. 

The purpose of history is not reached until 
every institution and personality with which we 
may be in a direct or indirect will-relation is un- 
derstood as a complex of agreements and disa- 
agreements, that is, of will-attitudes towards other 
subjects. This regress must be, of course, infi- 
nite, just as no physical process can be reached 
which has not again causes and effects ; and this 
task demands also, like the naturalistic sciences, 
a continual transformation. Just as the physical 
object is not really a complex of atoms and the 
psychological idea not really a complex of sen- 
sations, but must be in thought transformed into 
such to make causal connection possible, so in 
exactly the same way history must reconstruct 
the personalities and institutions as complexes of 
will-attitudes, which they really are not, but as 
which they must be considered to make the un- 
broken teleological connection possible. And, 
again, like physics and psychology, history too 
cannot communicate to us the whole of the con- 



214 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

nected system, but has to work out the general 
facts which give to every single fact at once its 
place in the whole system. These general facts 
in the teleological will-system cannot be causal 
laws, but must be will-relations of more and 
more comprehensive character. Just as in the 
world of objects the general law covers and de- 
termines the causal changes of an unlimited 
number of objects, so the important will-actions 
cover and determine in the world of subjects the 
impulses and suggestions for the decisions and 
attitudes of an unlimited number. The regu- 
larity of the causal law and the importance of 
the imposing will lift in a corresponding way the 
general fact over the level of the single facts. 
It is the work of history to make conspicuous 
the increasingly important will-influences, as it 
is the work of physics and psychology to work 
out the laws. If I say I am a German, I want 
to assert by that statement that I acknowledge 
by my will a world of laws, institutions, hopes 
and ideals which are the will-demands of an 
undetermined multitude of subjects ; this multi- 
tude constitutes the historical nation of Ger- 
many. But it would be unscientific if I should 
start to interpret the attitude of every one who 
is part of that chaotic mass of subjects ; it is 
the work of science to find those influences 
which determined the multitude, those will-acts 
which were imitated and acknowledged by the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 215 

unimportant subjects. The chaos thus becomes 
order, and Goethe and Beethoven, Kant and 
Hegel, Luther and Bismarck, stand as the gen- 
eral facts for the millions and millions of less 
important subjects who were determined by their 
suggestions. Any individual's historical place 
is then characterized by his will-attitudes to- 
wards the leaders. Just as the naturalist knows 
a whole hierarchy of sciences which work out 
increasingly general laws up to mechanics as the 
most abstract system, so history can consider in 
different stages the will-relations of more and 
more comprehensive character. The most ab- 
stract view is represented by the so-called phi- 
losophy of history, which aims at understanding 
the history of the world as determined by one 
decision of the will. In this spirit the concep- 
tion of original sin in the theological systems of 
the Middle Ages was in the field of historical 
thinking perhaps not less marvelous than the 
conception of atomistic mechanism in the realm 
of natural science. The fact that Adam did not 
exist in reality is as little an objection to the 
mediaeval construction as the fact that no atom 
can really exist militates against our atomism; 
both reconstructions of reality fill merely ideal 
places as necessary goals of thought. 

On the other hand, in the same way that 
mechanics does not lower the importance of 
special natural sciences, no all-embracing theory 



216 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

of the history of man can interfere with the 
importance of the special historic disciplines 
down to the biographies of single personalities. 
But even the biography has to work in the same 
direction as the most abstract philosophy of 
history, in the direction of general connection. 
The real biography written in an historical spirit 
shows in the individual the attitudes towards the 
demands and suggestions which make the history 
of mankind ; the single man becomes thus the 
crossing point of all the political, technical, reli- 
gious, aBsthetical, intellectual impulses of his 
time, and he is thus by the will-attitudes which 
constitute his personality connected with the 
whole universe of will-acts. As the astronomer 
in his calculations describes the one curve of a 
star as the combination of a large number of 
impulses by attraction, and thus brings the star 
in relation to the whole firmament, so the his- 
torical biographer reconstructs the one life as a 
system of single attitudes towards an endless 
multitude of demands and suggestions. It is a 
complete transformation in the service of connec- 
tion. The man's life can be told otherwise also : 
the life as he feels it as a personal experience ; 
so also do we learn to understand the man, but 
we have then poetry and not history ; it is isola- 
tion and not connection. And if, instead, we 
describe and explain his life as a set of ideas, 
feelings, emotions, and volitions which arose in 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 217 

his psychophysical system from birth to death, 
then we have again a transformation in the ser- 
vice of connection, but this time for the causal 
connection of objects, not for the teleological 
connection of subjects ; it is again not history, 
but psychology. 

VIII 

The separation of the material of the two 
sciences is thus simple and clear; there can 
never be a doubt about the line of demarcation, 
as there is no psychophysical object in the world 
— from the sensations of a frog up to the ideas 
of Newton, the emotions of Byron, and the voli- 
tions of Cromwell — which is not a suitable 
object of psychology, and as there is no sub- 
jective individual act which cannot be linked 
into the endless teleological system of history. 
A division of material, as if a social psychology, 
for instance, were to deal with the psychical 
processes of the unknown masses, while history 
were to deal with the psychical processes of the 
well-known men, is an absurdity. Not less mis- 
leading would be an antithesis between savagery 
and civilization. From a psychophysical stand- 
point such a line is secondary; the organism 
which adds outer appendages to his body to 
make the psychophysical functions more effec- 
tive has reached merely a higher stage of bio- 
logical development, but is not different in prin- 



218 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

ciple from the lower type in which nature does 
not provide for detachable acquisitions of the 
or onanism. The animal which runs with loco- 
motives, sees with microscopes, hears with tele- 
phones, makes gestures of expression through 
newspapers, attacks through cannons, and remem- 
bers through libraries, stands above the savage as 
a dog stands above a jelly-fish, but it is theoreti- 
cally nothing new ; it is a more complicated pro- 
duct of nature which, therefore, offers a more 
difficult problem to the descriptions and expla- 
nations of psychology and physiology, but does 
not as such become material for history. And 
still another line of separation must disappear ; 
the n>ht between the " materialists " and the 
" idealists " of the recent economical schools has 
nothing to do with the doubleness of psycho- 
logical naturalism and real historical aspect. If 
the materialists claim that every occurrence 
among: men is the direct or indirect effect of 
economical causes, while the idealists consider 
other causes still which seem to them independent 
of material conditions, for instance, religious 
and patriotic emotion or ambition and love, both 
sides stand fully on the ground of psychology 
and outside of history. Those emotions of 
practical idealism are in question only as psycho- 
physical causes, and are thus material merely for 
a causal system. In the system of history exists 
no causality. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 219 

Here is the point where even the historians 
themselves are inclined to compromises which, 
at least in principle, must be rejected. Whether 
or not practically quite interesting reports of 
periods of civilization can be written by mixing 
the two attitudes is secondary. Historians, we 
know, produced in earlier times their deepest 
effects by mixing history with ethics, but the 
philosopher at least must be clear that ethics is 
not history, and he ought to be still less in doubt 
that a causally explaining social psychology is 
not history either. As soon as it is acknow- 
ledged that we have, on the one side, an interest 
to consider human life as an object and thus to 
describe and to explain it, and that we have, on 
the other side, a logical aim to understand 
human life as subjective acts which can be inter- 
preted and linked together only by will-attitudes, 
then we must have the energy to keep the two 
systems separated. Each is logically valuable, 
each is therefore true, but if confused both 
become logically useless. 

We can say that Socrates remained in the 
prison because his knee muscles were contracted 
in a sitting position and not working to effect 
his escape, and that these muscle-processes took 
place because certain psychophysical ideas, emo- 
tions, and volitions, all composed of elementary 
sensations, occurred in his brain, and that they, 
again, were the effects of all the causes which 



220 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

sense stimulations and dispositions, associations 
and inhibitions, physiological and climatic influ- 
ences, produced in that organism. And we can 
say, on the other hand, that Socrates remained 
in the prison because he decided to be obedient 
to the laws of Athens unto death. This obedi- 
ence means, then, not a psychophysical process, 
but a will-attitude which we must understand 
by feeling it and living through it, an attitude 
which we cannot analyze, but which we inter- 
pret and appreciate. The first is a psychological 
description ; the second is an historical interpre- 
tation. Both are true. They are, to be sure, 
not equally valuable for science, as that particu- 
lar psychophysical process is not more important 
for the understanding of the psychological sys- 
tem than millions of other emotions in unknown 
men, while that will-attitude influenced by its 
demand the acknowledging will of twenty cen- 
turies, and is thus most important in the his- 
torical system. And yet both are equally true, 
while they blend into an absurdity if we say that 
those psychophysical states in the brain of 
Socrates were the objects which inspired the will 
of his pupils and were suggestive through two 
thousand years. 

A history which interprets subjectively and 
understands their purposes out of the deeds of 
men relinquishes, indeed, its only aim if it coor- 
dinates these teleological relations with the causal 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 221 

explanation of human happenings from climatic 
and geographical, technical and economical, 
physiological and pathological influences. The 
subject which is determined by purposes is free ; 
the action which is the effect of causes is unf ree. 
In the unfree world there cannot be any action 
which must not be understood causally, and we 
have no right to stop at any point in our expla- 
nation ; the unexplained action means only an 
unsolved problem which is in no way solved if 
we seek for its subjective meaning instead of its 
elements and causes. In the world of freedom, 
on the other hand, it would be meaningless to 
ask for cause, as the objects then come in ques- 
tion merely as objects for the willing subjects 
and not as realities for themselves. The realm 
of freedom is not made up of oases in the world 
of necessity ; the reality of history is not spread 
here and there over the field of nature, but lies 
fully outside of its limits. The antithesis be- 
tween psychology and history is thus not law 
and single event, but causality and freedom, and 
this difference is the logical result of the onto- 
logical difference of the material, the one deal- 
ing with objects, the other with subjects. Both 
go methodologically the same way, considering 
the single facts from the point of view of the 
general fact, and both transforming the dis- 
connected material until a perfectly connected 
system is reached. But because objects are 



222 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

understood by describing and explaining them, 
while subjects are understood by interpreting 
and appreciating them, the connection of the 
one system must be causal, that of the other 
system teleological, and the general fact in the 
one field must be a law and in the other field 
the will relation of importance. As every sub- 
jective act can be replaced by a psychophy- 
sical function of an organism in the world of 
objects, and as every object can be understood 
as a value for a will, the whole reality can be 
brought without any possible remainder under 
the one aspect as well as under the other. His- 
tory, in the real historical spirit, then need no 
longer fear that the progress of psychology can 
inhibit its functions, and the psychologist need 
not feel discouraged that his psychological laws 
of history appear so utterly trivial to the his- 
torian. That which is important for psychology, 
that which is fit for constructing connections 
between psychological objects, has the privilege 
of being indifferent for the historian, that is, of 
being unfit to link subjective will - attitudes. 
Psychology and history cannot help each other 
and cannot interfere with each other as long as 
they consistently stick to their own aims. Each 
of them has thus unlimited opportunities for 
development. The processions of the great 
psychologists from Aristotle to Herbart, and 
that of the great historians from Thucydides to 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 223 

Macaulay, can both have for the future an un- 
limited number of followers without any quarrel, 
in spite of the naturalistic claims of our age, 
which for a while was under the illusion that all 
is understood when all is explained, and that the 
historians had better become psychologists. 

IX 

As soon as the difference of the two stand- 
points is recognized, light falls on all the special 
characteristics of the two sciences. Now we 
understand why history stands so much nearer 
to real life than psychology. Not, as it was 
suggested, because history deals with single facts 
and psychology with general facts, but because 
psychology deals with objects which are thought 
as independent of the subject, while in reality 
and so in history the material is acknowledged 
only in relation to willing subjects. In real life 
we are subjects which must be understood but 
not described ; psychology starts thus at once 
with a material which in its singleness is already 
farther away from reality than the material with 
which history deals. Now we understand also 
why the substance of history has value for us, 
while the objects of psychology and of all natu- 
ralistic sciences are emotionally indifferent. That 
is not, as it was suggested, because the single 
facts are important for us and the general facts 
indifferent; no, it is because the psychological 



224 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

objects, the contents of consciousness, are thought 
as cut loose from the will and thus no longer 
possible objects for appreciation, while the his- 
torical objects are thought as in their relation to 
the attitudes of the will. Now we understand 
also under which principle the historian selects 
his material. If we accept the view that all 
single facts belong to history as such, it is arbi- 
trariness to chronicle Napoleon's battles and 
state acts but not his flirtations and breakfasts, 
while now we understand how it is that this 
selection means the most essential part of the 
historian's work, as it is the way to transform 
the reality into a system of teleological connec- 
tions, thus dropping more and more the will-acts 
which have no teleological importance for will- 
attitudes of other subjects. Now we understand 
also why the language of the historian has so 
much similarity with that of the poet. The his- 
torian, we have seen, has aims which are directly 
antagonistic to those of the poet, as the poet 
isolates, while the historian, like every scientist, 
connects his material. But the materials them- 
selves, the subjective acts, are common to the 
poet and the historian. Where the psychologist 
encourages the reader to take the attitude of the 
objectively perceiving observer, the poet and the 
historian speak of facts which can be understood 
only by interpretation and inner imitation ; they 
cannot be described by enumerating their ele- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 225 

ments ; they must be suggested and reach some- 
how the willing subject which enters into the 
subjective attitude of the other. Thus the means 
of both may approximate to each other. The 
poet and the historian may use the same meth- 
ods of suggestion to reinforce in the reader the 
subjectifying attitude which is the presupposition 
for the understanding of the isolated will-acts in 
the work of poetry and the connected will-acts 
in the work of history, while the psychologist 
has to adapt even his style and his presentation 
to the service of his objectifying aim. 

But we now understand and see in a new li^ht 
also the relations of the psychological and his- 
torical sciences to the normative doctrines, to 
ethics, logic, and aesthetics. As long as history 
appears merely as a part of psychology or as long 
as the one is given over to single facts, the other 
to laws, all the normative sciences stand without 
any inner relation to any empirical science, those 
speaking of duties, these of facts. For us the 
relation takes a very different form. We have 
seen that all the historical sciences are systems 
of individual will-relations and nothing else. On 
the other hand, we have found that duty never 
means anything but our own over-individual will- 
act. All the normative sciences are thus the 
systematic connections of our over-individual 
will-attitudes, our will-attitudes aiming toward 
morality and truth and beauty and religion. As 



226 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

the over-individual will is, of course, thought as 
independent of the individual subject, the con- 
nection which is sought cannot lead as it did in 
history from subject to subject; as all subjects 
are presupposed as agreeing in their over-indi- 
vidual acknowledgment, the connection, the sci- 
entific aim can then lie here merely in the sys- 
tematic connection of our own over-individual 
purposes and their interpretation. Here, too, 
a transformation becomes necessary in the in- 
terest of connection ; each single will-attitude 
must be linked into this teleological system, and 
must thus be transformed till it represents a 
crossing point of all the ethical, sesthetical, re- 
ligious, and logical impulses and demands. The 
normative sciences and history stand thus in the 
nearest relation to each other ; both are trans- 
formations of will-acts in the service of teleo- 
logical connection, only the one reconstructs and 
systematizes the individual will-acts in us, the 
other the over-individual will-acts. 

The relation between these two groups of sci- 
ences> the historical and the normative ones, is 
thus perfectly parallel to the relation between 
the psychological sciences and the physical sci- 
ences, of which the one systematizes the indi- 
vidual objects and the other the over-individual 
objects. The proportion — history stands to 
the normative doctrines as psychology stands to 
physics — is, indeed, true in every respect and in 



PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 227 

every consequence. We may consider here as 
our last word only one of them. The historical 
development of the naturalistic sciences shows 
the continuous tendency to take more and more 
of the properties of the physical object into the 
psychological object, that is, to show that the 
apparent over-individual qualities of the thing 
are qualities which depend upon the individual ; 
color and sound, smell and taste, go over from 
the physical thing into the idea, and thus the 
whole manif oldness of our experience moves over 
into the sphere of ideas. In exactly the same 
way and led by the same methodological mo- 
tives, history takes more and more of the nor- 
mative duties over into its own field, and shows 
how the special duties, the logical beliefs, ethical 
convictions, sesthetical demands and religious pos- 
tulates are the results of individual attitudes under 
the suggestion of the individual groups of will- 
influences. The absolute duties and beliefs and 
obligations and truths seem thus lost in our life 
as the colors and sounds and smells are lost for 
the physical objects. But the parallelism holds 
for the end-point of this development too. We 
must deprive the physical object of its colors 
and sounds, but we cannot give up the truth 
that there is a physical object nevertheless, as 
the quantitative reality to which we project, with 
objective truth, our sensations and ideas ; all the 
naturalistic sciences would be destroyed if we 



228 PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY 

were to give up this realistic conviction of physics. 
In the same way we may take into the individual 
all the single over-individual special duties o£ 
special nations and ages and social groups, but 
the reality of the background of projection we 
cannot give up. Whatever history teaches, the 
postulate of the reality of duties, of absolute 
values, stands firm. The absolute duties may 
be abstract and deprived of color and sound as 
is the world of physics, but they stand and must 
last like the physical universe, and whoever in 
striving towards truth denies the reality of abso- 
lute values and gives up the belief in morality 
and the belief in logic, thus destroys and under- 
mines his own endeavor to find the truth as 
logical thinker and to stand for the truth as 
ethical man. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 



Mysticism — that is, the belief in supernatural 
connections in the physical and psychical worlds 
— has always been an interesting object of ob- 
servation for the psychologist. When the hu- 
man mind believes that it has reached the realm 
unseen, psychology can analyze its inner experi- 
ences and follow up the devious paths from 
empirical knowledge to the knowing of the 
mysterious Unknowable. From this point of 
view, psychology finds a wonderful field of work 
in the mystical systems from the earliest Hindoo 
speculation to the spiritualistic doctrines of to- 
day ; and its interest in mysticism is the deeper 
and more spontaneous, the more complicated 
the motives which push the soul beyond the 
limits of natural insight. Religious emotion and 
hysterical rapture, mysterious fears and super- 
stitious habits, pathological disturbances and 
surprising experiences, abnormal credulity and 
dissatisfaction with science, and very many other 
true and half-true impulses come in question. 
Even the pseudo-mystic, who deceives the world 



230 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

because he knows that the world wishes to be 
deceived, becomes an attractive object for psy- 
chological analysis ; fanaticism regarding the 
church and greed for bread and butter, hysteri- 
cal pleasure in irritating tricks and sensuous 
pleasure in power over others, are here among 
the most characteristic features. What a differ- 
ence between the neoplatonistic philosopher, who 
sinks into the Absolute and finds the super- 
natural reality by his feeling of unity with God, 
and the modern member of a Society for Psy- 
chical Research, who discovers the supernatural 
world by his mathematical calculations on the 
probable error in telepathic answers about play- 
ing-cards ! What a difference between the 
mediaeval monk, who becomes convinced of the 
mystical sphere because the Virgin appears to 
him in the clouds, and the modern scholar, who 
is converted because a pathological woman is 
able to chat about his personal secrets at the 
rate of twenty francs a sitting ! Yet psychology 
recognizes the common features and understands 
the mental laws which make mysticism a never- 
failing element of the social consciousness ; the 
wilder its eccentricities, the more interesting the 
psychological material. 

But the claims of mysticism suggest to the 
psychologist another attitude less peaceable than 
that of the observer, the attitude of a rival. If 
mystics believed only that heavy chairs some- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 231 

times fly through the air, that invisible bells 
ring, and that objects disappear into the fourth 
dimension, they would have to fight it out with 
the physicists, but psychology would not inter- 
fere. If, inspired by occult advisers, they pro- 
posed a new metaphysical theory of the ultimate 
substratum of the physical universe, the philoso- 
phers might stand up as indignant competitors, 
but the psychologists, again, would have nothing 
to do with it. The physicians may dispute with 
the mystics whether the waters of Lourdes are 
helpful, whether the comets are causes of pesti- 
lence, and whether men die on account of being 
thirteenth at table. There is, perhaps, not a single 
science, from geometry to theology, which has 
not its private conflicts with the mystical doc- 
trines ; but psychology has no reason to enter 
the quarrel so long as the mystic does not under- 
take to answer psychological questions. In this 
field, however, mysticism has never shown too 
much modesty. It has at all times, by prefer- 
ence, rioted in the proclamation of mental facts 
which did not fit into the descriptions and ex- 
planations of a sober empirical psychology. If 
mysticism is right with its old claims, psy- 
chology, even with its newest discoveries, is 
wrong ; and thus arises the question, What has 
the psychologist to say of the claims of mysti- 
cism concerning mental processes and the laws 
of mental action ? 



232 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

These claims have been different at different 
periods and in different nations, and are still so 
divergent that no scientist can contend more 
sharply with the mystical creeds than they 
contend with one another in the different sets 
to-day. The telepathists annihilate the theoso- 
phists, and the spiritualists belittle the telepa- 
thists ; and when the Christian scientists and 
metaphysical healers on the one side, the mind 
curers and faith curers on the other side, have 
spoken of each other, there remain few abusive 
words at the disposal of us outsiders. The 
average mystic of to-day is a man of high logical 
ambitions. He looks with contempt on the 
gypsy who reads your character from the 
grounds in a coffee-cup, and smiles over the as- 
trological belief that the position of the stars in 
the hour of your birth has decided your success 
in love. The medical remedies which have to be 
cooked at midnight at the churchyard gate are 
in discredit ; and as we live in an enlightened 
asre, it even appears doubtful whether the 



'O 



appears 



witches of early time were really under Satanic 
influences, as their witchcraft can now be " ex- 
plained" by the telepathic action of mediums, 
by malicious spirits and materializations. The 
requirements of mysticism thus shrink to the 
following main demands. First, the human 
mind must sometimes be able to perceive in an 
incomprehensible way the ideas and thoughts of 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 233 

others. By gradual approaches, this telepathic 
talent seems also connected with the power to 
have knowledge of distant physical occurrences ; 
and if our concessions have reached this point, 
we ought not to strain at the little addendum, 
the vision of the future. In all cases of this 
kind the exceptional talents of the soul are re- 
ceptive and passive. A second group of mysti- 
cal powers may be formed by the corresponding 
active influences. In an inconceivable way, it 
is assumed, the human mind can control the 
thoughts and actions of others ; and here, again, 
small steps lead soon to greater and greater mys- 
teries. The mental influence may reach not 
only the soul, but also the body of the other 
person, and may restore his disturbed health; 
even a child may produce such metaphysical 
healing of consumption and heart trouble, can- 
cer and broken legs. The mind which by " love " 
brings together the fragments of a neighbor's 
broken bones ought surely to have no serious 
difficulties with the movements of inorganic 
bodies : at the bidding of such a mind, tables 
fly to the ceiling, and a little stick in the hands 
of a weak woman cannot be moved by the 
strongest man. A third group refers to the 
functions of a deeper self, which is usually hid- 
den under our regular personality. In the most 
different trance states, in crystal vision and auto- 
matic writing, this mysterious self appears, and 



234 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

remembers all that we have forgotten, knows 
many things which we never knew, writes and 
acts without our control, and shows connections 
which go far beyond our powers, and mostly 
even beyond our tastes. Nearly related to these 
facts is a fourth circle of mystical doctrines, 
which deal with the psychical deeds of the hu- 
man spirit after the earthly death. According 
to these doctrines, the spirits are ready to enter 
into communication with living men by the help 
of mediums, with or without materialization, by 
noises or by table tilting, by slate drawing, and 
recently even by typewriting. This creed be- 
comes, of course, the starting-point for many 
denominational divergences. 

II 

The most natural question is, How far can the 
regular empirical psychology acknowledge the 
claimed phenomena ? Where is the exact limit 
which the scientific psychologist is unwilling to 
pass ? He does not discredit perception of voices 
from far distances if a telephone is included, 
and he does not doubt that one person may have 
influence over another in a hundred ways. We 
must carefully consider where the mystery be- 
gins. The attitude of common sense, however, 
must not be allowed to dictate this line of de- 
marcation ; otherwise the psychologist would be 
bound to denounce all facts which are rare and 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 235 

surprising to the naive consciousness, or incapa- 
ble of explanation to the dilettante. Let us 
remember that it counts for little whether a fact 
occurs once a day or once in a century, and that 
many facts of physiological and pathological 
psychology must appear to the naive mind much 
more surprising and alarming than do the pre- 
tensions of the spiritualist. It seems much 
simpler and more natural to grant that a little 
word or figure may wander by mere thought 
transference from one's mind into the mind of a 
bystander, than to believe in the startling fea- 
tures of the more complicated cases of hypno- 
tism and somnambulism, hysteria and insanity, 
all of which find legitimate place in the system 
of modern psychology. 

If we begin with the first two groups of the 
claims of mystics, — the passive reception of 
outer psychical and physical events, and the 
active influence upon other souls and organisms, 
— we can easily state the general principle which 
here controls the psychological attitude, though 
it may often be far from easy to follow up the 
principle in specific cases. The psychologist in- 
sists that every perception of occurrences outside 
of one's own body and every influence beyond 
one's own organism must be intermediated by an 
uninterrupted chain of physical processes. The 
justice of this apparently arbitrary decision may 
be examined later ; at first we ask only for its 



236 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

precise meaning and its consequences. With re- 
gard to perception, the limit is certainly sharply 
drawn, and yet it may be often difficult to recog- 
nize it. We perceive only objects which directly 
or indirectly stimulate our physical sense organs, 
and which stimulate them by physical means. 
The perception of a man's body is therefore the 
primary process ; the perception of his thoughts 
and feelings is secondary, as they must be some- 
how physically expressed in order to act as 
stimuli for the sense organs. 

In two directions the case may become abnor- 
mal : the transmitter or the receiver may differ 
from the usual type of communicating persons. 
The transmitter himself, for instance, may not 
be conscious that he expresses his ideas, or, 
better, that his ideas discharge themselves in 
perceptible physical processes. He may blush 
without knowing it, and thus betray his inner 
shame ; or he may contract the muscles which 
turn his body toward the outer point he is think- 
ing of; or his breathing or pulse may change 
through his excitement over a question ; and the 
receiver may be in a situation to become aware 
of these unintended signals of inner states. 
Here belongs the well-known stage piece of 
muscle reading, which is often carelessly con- 
fused with real telepathy. It certainly is one of 
the easily explicable forms of psychophysical 
communication. Here belong as well all the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 237 

slight hints by which nervous persons make it 
possible again and again for confessed impostors 
to play the roles of successful mind readers. 
The pseudo-mediums need only to seek for in- 
formation in desultory chatting, which, under 
the high tension of expectancy, suffices to bring 
about all kinds of unintended expressions which 
show the clever juggler the way. 

The receiver of the physical impressions, also, 
may differ from the average. We think pri- 
marily of the possibility that the receiving in- 
struments — that is, the sense organs or the 
sensory brain parts and nerve paths — may have 
become abnormally sensitive, by training or by 
pathological variations. Through the touch 
sensation of his face the blind man perceives 
distant obstacles in his way, to which our un- 
trained central sense apparatus is unresponsive ; 
but that does not conflict with the propositions 
of psychology, and is not mystical. We know 
that the threshold for just perceptible sensations 
is often surprisingly lowered for hypnotic and 
hysterical subjects, who can thus perceive faint 
impressions and signals which must escape the 
normal consciousness. Even if a man were so 
gifted as to discriminate smells like a dog, or to 
see the ultra-violet rays, or to perceive solids by 
the Roentgen rays, or if he had a sense organ for 
electric currents more sensitive than the finest 
galvanometer, the psychologist would have no 



238 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

reason for skepticism so long as the physical 
nature of the transmission from the outer object 
to the brain is admitted. Other variations in 
the receiver may be determined by his state of 
attention. An outer stimulus may reach his 
brain by the door of his senses without producing 
an apperceived idea at the moment, but not 
without influence on his later feelings and ac- 
tions ; a molecular alteration of the brain dispo- 
sition may last and work as after effect of the 
stimulation without having attracted the atten- 
tion at all. This occurrence, also, which in 
narrow limits is famihar and usual enough, may 
be pathologically exaggerated, and may then, as 
for instance in hysterical cases, produce surpris- 
ing results, if the subject shows undoubted 
knowledge of facts which he could never have 
acquired consciously ; but this, likewise, nowhere 
transcends the psychological probabilities. 

Still more complicated, perhaps, are the varia- 
tions in the active power of the mind, within the 
limits which psychologists willingly acknowledge, 
or at least ought to acknowledge. Our thoughts 
and volitions certainly have influence on other 
minds ; we should not speak a word nor write a 
line if we did not believe that. But again we 
consider the psychical effects which we produce 
in others as intermediated by physical processes. 
We stimulate the optic and acoustic and tactual 
nerves of others with the purpose of reaching 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 239 

their central nervous system, and of producing 
there the ideas with which we started. These 
ideas must then work for themselves ; they stir 
up their associations and awaken their inhibi- 
tions, but the outsider cannot add anything fur- 
ther. He can only communicate the ideas, and 
let them work in the receiver from a psychologi- 
cal point of view ; that is all the influence we 
have on our fellow men. 

Ill 

There is one complication of this trivial pro- 
cess of communication which seems to touch the 
borderland of mysticism, — hypnotic sugges- 
tion. The hypnotized subject must do what- 
ever the hypnotizer suggests to him. Here the 
will of one mind seems to have an incompre- 
hensible influence over the other, and as if it 
were only a short way from the hypnotic rap- 
port to the influences of mystical character; 
that is, of a kind which excludes the possibility 
of physical intermediation. The resemblance is 
deceptive, however ; even the most complicated 
case of hypnotic influence is based only on ele- 
mentary actions which occur every moment in 
our normal mental life. If we want some one 
to do a thing, we communicate our wish to him, 
trusting that the idea proposed will discharge 
itself in the desired motor action. That cor- 
responds fully to our general knowledge that 



240 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

every sensory mental state is at the same time 
the starting-point of motor impulses. If we say 
to our neighbor, "Please pass me the cream," 
we take for granted that the communicated idea 
will discharge itself in the little action. But if 
we say, "Please jump out of the window," the 
result will not be the same. The communicated 
idea by itself alone would have the effect of 
producing the action demanded, but it awakens 
by the regular associative mechanism a set of 
ideas on the folly of the demand and the danger 
of the undertaking, and all these associations are 
starting-points for antagonistic impulses which 
are finally reinforced by the whole personality : 
the proposed action is thus inhibited, and the 
man does not jump. He would jump if the an- 
tagonistic idea could be kept down ; and in this 
case the foolish action would be just as neces- 
sarily determined by the conditions and just as 
natural as the reasonable one. But we all know 
that this power of ideas to overcome antagonistic 
associations is quite a normal thing, active in the 
most varying measure everywhere in our normal 
mental life. 

We call an idea which thus checks the an- 
tagonistic one a suggestion, and we may be sure 
that no education or art, no politics or church 
life, would be possible without such suggestions. 
The idea may become a suggestion by the way 
in which it is presented, but it may also acquire 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 241 

this character by the disposition of the receiver. 
We know there are stubborn men who contra- 
dict every proposition, and there are others who 
are open to every new idea without inner resist- 
ance, and ready to believe everything they hear, 
or even everything they see in print. They 
are thus more at the mercy of suggestions ; we 
say they show greater suggestibility. On the 
other hand, every man's suggestibility is vari- 
able ; it is increased by fear and other emotions, 
by alcohol and other nervines, and under special 
conditions it may reach a pathological intensity. 
This abnormal degree of suggestibility, in which 
the antagonistic associations of the suggested 
ideas are more or less completely inhibited, is the 
mental state we call hypnotism. If this state 
of increased suggestibility is reached, the outer 
action which fulfills the proposed suggestion 
becomes, through the regular psychophysical 
mechanism, unavoidable. The final results, to 
be sure, may appear surprisingly different from 
the normal actions of the personality, but even 
the most absurd hypnotic action is based on these 
simple psychological principles. As, theoreti- 
cally, everybody can hypnotize everybody, it is 
obvious that no special mystical power need be 
invoked at this point ; and even if we induce 
the hypnotized subject to do a criminal action, it 
is no mysterious power with which we overcome 
his honesty, but a combination of processes 



242 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

which are neither clearer nor more obscure than 
normal attention and association. There is not 
the slightest reason to consider hypnotism, with 
all its ramifications, as in any degree mystical 
because of its weird and alarming results. We 
may not understand every detail as yet, but 
nothing need suggest any doubt that other prin- 
ciples are involved than those in daily mental 
activity. Hypnotism is free from responsibility 
for mystical theories. Mysticism, on the other 
hand, cannot hope to pass through the entrance 
door of science on account of its superficial simi- 
larity to some hypnotic cases. 

Practically, the two may be mixed till they 
are indistinguishable. In spiritualistic seances 
the plain hypnotic phenomena are not seldom 
used to smooth the way for the telepathic mys- 
ticism, as criticism of the latter will be less sharp 
if the first part of the performance is undoubt- 
edly reliable. If there is no physical interme- 
diation between the transmitter and the receiver, 
thought transference remains mystical, and whe- 
ther the receiver is hypnotized or not has nothing 
to do with the case. No change is involved 
by the belief of the subject, no matter how sin- 
cere, that he is under such mystical influence 
from far distances. Only a short time ago I 
had such a case under my observation. There 
came to me, late at night, a stranger, in wildest 
despair, resolved to commit suicide that night if 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 243 

I could not help him. He had been a physi- 
cian, but had given up his practice because his 
brother, on the other side of the ocean, hated 
him and had him under his telepathic influence, 
troubling him from over the sea with voices 
which mocked him and with impulses to foolish 
actions. He had not slept nor had he eaten 
anything for several days, and the only chance 
for life he saw was that a new hypnotic influ- 
ence might overpower the mystical hypnotic 
forces. I soon found the source of his trouble. 
In treating himself for a wound he had misused 
cocaine in an absurd way, and the hallucination 
of voices was the chief symptom of his cocain- 
ism. These products of his poisoned brain 
had sometimes reference to his brother in Europe, 
and thus the telepathic idea grew in him and 
permeated his whole life. I hypnotized him, 
and suggested to him with success to have sleep 
and food and a smaller dose of cocaine. Then 
I hypnotized him daily for six weeks. After 
ten days he gave up cocaine entirely, after three 
weeks the voices disappeared, and after that the 
other symptoms faded away. It was not, however, 
until the end that the telepathic theory was ex- 
ploded. Even when the voices had gone, he 
felt for a while that his movements were con- 
trolled from over the ocean ; and after six 
weeks, when I had made him quite well again, 
he laughed over his telepathic absurdities, but 



244 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

assured me that if these sensations came a^ain 
he should be unable, even in full health, to 
resist the mystical interpretation, so vividly had 
he felt the distant influences. 

IV 

This case may bring us to another main group 
of personal influences, the therapeutical ones. 
The man of common sense is more suspicious of 
fraud in this field than anywhere else, and yet 
the psychologist must here concede as possible a 
greater part of the claimed facts than in the 
other domains of mysticism. He will reject a 
good deal, it is true, and in acknowledging the 
rest of the facts he will not think of committing 
himself to the theories ; yet he must feel sorry 
that truth demands from him the acknowledg- 
ment of anything, not because he thinks himself 
bound to advertise the regular practicing phy- 
sician, but because he knows how these facts 
carry with them a flock of contagious confus- 
ing ideas. Seen from the standpoint of the psy- 
chologist, the line between the possible and 
the mysterious healing influences of personality 
is fairly though not absolutely sharp. We have 
seen that every normal psychophysical state has 
the tendency to go over into peripheral bodily 
processes. We have so far noticed only the pro- 
cesses in the voluntary muscles, the so-called 
actions, and we have found that there is no 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 245 

special power involved and that no mystery need 
be invoked, but that every idea discharges itself 
in an action provided the antagonistic ideas are 
checked. But the motor nerves and muscular 
apparatus represent only a part of the cen- 
tral and centrifugal system which can be stimu- 
lated by sensory processes. The researches of 
physiology have fully proved that our involun- 
tary muscles and our blood-vessels, our glands 
and our internal organs, are under the influ- 
ence of our central system. Our whole body in 
every instant resounds in every part to the vari- 
ations of our brain activity, and the normal 
functioning of our organism depends in a large 
degree on the right work of these central stimu- 
lations. Are they absent or inhibited, some- 
thing must go wrong ; and if the central stimu- 
lus can be enforced, if the antagonistic inhibition 
can be checked, the right tension and the normal 
functioning must return as necessarily and as 
naturally as the suggested action must occur 
when the contradicting ideas are removed. We 
have seen that hypnotism is nothing but a psy- 
chophysical state of increased suggestibility; 
that is, a state in which the suggested ideas find 
less resistance than in normal life. If the hyp- 
notized patient receives suggestions which refer 
to those physiological functions which are de- 
pendent upon the central nervous system, the 
change and the readjustment of the organic 



246 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

functions by the removal of false inhibitions and 
by the reinforcement of useful central stimula- 
tions are certainly no more obscure than the 
action of antipyrine and phenacetine. Even 
that which may be still obscure in the action of 
the suggestions can be only a matter of details, 
not of principles. 

There are two methods of suggestion open : 
a more active and talkative way, which turns 
the subject's attention to the desired point by 
direct suggestions, and a more passive and silent 
way, which attempts a general quieting of the 
mind, in which a new balance of impulses may 
be inaugurated, and the desire for normal func- 
tions may work itself up to increased influence. 
Every good physician makes use of these two 
means to increase the effectiveness of his reme- 
dies. At the right time, they are almost a 
substitute for all other aid, and in the mystical 
therapy of all periods through four thousand 
years they have developed a high technique. 
To-day, the passive method of indirect sugges- 
tion is the vehicle of the Christian scientists and 
metaphysical healers ; the active way of more 
direct suggestion belongs to the mind curers and 
mental healers. 

Much of the success of both methods depends, 
of course, upon the ability of the transmitter to 
make the suggestions effective. His personal 
appearance and way of talking, his voice and 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 247 

temperament, must be persuasive, and his reputa- 
tion and authority must reinforce the expectancy 
which prepares the inhibitions. Teachers and 
lawyers and ministers strengthen their influence 
by these silent servants of a dominant mind. 
Many of these personal qualities can be replaced, 
to be sure, by merely mechanical tricks which 
can be imitated and taught. Our mystical 
schools bring this technique to external virtuos- 
ity. But still more important are the antecedent 
conditions in the mind of the patient. Whoever 
has seen the patients in the clinic of a famous 
hypnotist (half hypnotized as soon as they pass 
the door of the hospital) knows how the fascina- 
tion of the attention by belief — by any belief — 
works favorably for the increase of suggestibility ; 
so that the smallest additional intruder, perhaps 
the sensation of half-darkened light, of soft 
touch, of muscle strain in the eyes, is sufficient 
to bring about the new equilibrium of psycho- 
physical impulses. The most vulgar and trivial 
belief will answer ; the most absurd superstition 
can bring success, as everything depends upon 
the intensity of the subject's submission ; and 
the more pitiable the intellectual powers of a 
creature, the greater may be his chance of a cure 
by idiotic manipulations. To deny this in the 
interest of science would be unscientific. 

The most deep-seated form of belief is reli- 
gious faith, and there cannot be the slightest 



248 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

doubt that religious emotion, from the lowest 
f etichism to the highest protestantism, has always 
been fertile soil for therapeutical suggestions. 
What we have called the active method appeals 
to the subjective faith with direct words; the 
passive method awakens the same fascination 
indirectly, lulling to sleep the antagonistic 
impulses by a feeling that the mind of the 
transmitter has reached by prayer and love a 
supernatural unity with the mind of the patient. 
We must not forget that it is not the solemn 
value of the religious revelation, nor the ethical 
and metaphysical bearing of its objects, which 
brings success, but solely the depth of the emo- 
tion. To murmur the Greek alphabet with the 
touching intonation and gesture of supplication 
is just as strengthening for the health as the 
sublimest prayer ; and for the man who believes 
in the metaphysical cure, it may be quite unim- 
portant whether the love curer at his bedside 
thinks of the psychical Absolute or of the spring 
hat she will buy with the fee for her metaphy- 
sical healing. From the psychological point of 
view, the direct method of healing by faith and 
the indirect method of healing by love are thus 
almost identical ; both are confined to the nar- 
row limits within which the nervous system 
influences the pathological processes ; but in 
these limits both have some chances of a transi- 
tory success, and both are liable to the same 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 249 

illusions on the part of sincere healers and to the 
same humbug on the part of impostors. 



Our review has sought to examine the two 
large groups of facts which refer to the influ- 
ence of mind on mind, and to separate in both, 
in those of active influence and in those of 
passive reception, the psychological possibilities 
from those claims which the psychologist at first 
rejects. There are two groups more which we 
must sift, — the facts which lead to the theory 
of double consciousness, and the spiritualistic 
facts which refer to the communication of the 
living with the souls of the dead. In the former 
group there is little fault to be found with the 
facts ; only the theory is misleading. In the 
latter group, on the other hand, it may be diffi- 
cult to decide whether the claims for the facts 
or the attempts at theories are the more objec- 
tionable. The phenomena which suggest that a 
deeper personality lies hidden under the experi- 
ences of our surface personality are to-day gen- 
erally familiar and scientifically well studied. 
Typical of these phenomena are the interesting 
facts of automatic writing, apart from the at- 
tempts to give them a spiritualistic interpreta- 
tion. Our hands may be brought to write 
truths of which we are not conscious, and to 
answer questions which we do not perceive ; and 



250 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

these writings which we do not control may 
clearly belong to a special personality, with its 
own memory and its own wit and temper. Many 
similar facts which do not necessarily point in 
the same direction presuppose hysterical disturb- 
ances. It is true that the idea of a separated 
subject of consciousness offers itself to a super- 
ficial view as the simplest hypothesis, and the 
acceptance of this hypothesis gives a foothold 
for the most complicated mystical theories. But 
there are two groups of facts which we must 
keep in mind. First, we know that all our com- 
plicated useful actions which are acquired under 
the control of the intellectual attention, as 
walking and eating, speaking and reading and 
writing, become slowly automatic, yet nobody 
thinks of putting them under the care of a 
deeper personality ; we make the right move- 
ment in speaking without consciously intending 
the special tongue and lip movements, because 
the lower nerve centres steadily unburden the 
higher ones, and more and more easily trans- 
form the stimulus into the useful motor dis- 
charge. Even in the most complicated cases, 
therefore, the unconscious production of appar- 
ently chosen and adapted actions is no proof 
whatever that the whole process was not a merely 
physiological one. Secondly, a manifoldness of 
psychological personalities is in no way identical 
with a plurality of subjects of consciousness. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 251 

Every one of us finds in his consciousness a 
bundle of social personalities. We are different 
men in the office and in the family circle, in the 
political meeting and in the theatre; one does 
not care for the others, and may even ignore 
them ; each has his own memory connection and 
his own impulses. But they do not represent 
different subjects of consciousness, different 
groups of objects alternating in the same sub- 
ject. Of course these various empirical person- 
alities have always some elements in common, 
by which we can easily bridge over from one to 
the other, and remember our office anger in 
front of the stage of the theatre. No change 
in principle occurs when, by an abnormal brain 
process, these paths of association and connec- 
tion are blocked, and one personality remains 
without relations with the other. In such a case 
several personalities alternate, each consisting of 
a set of associations and impulses without remem- 
brance of the others. The student of hypnotism 
and hysteria is familiar with such phenomena. 
These personalities alternate in consciousness in 
the same way that groups of ideas succeed one 
another ; but the subject which is the bearer of 
all these personalities remains always the same, 
and the hypothesis that this subject itself 
changes when the content of the social person- 
ality changes is thus without support in the 
psychological interpretations of the normal idea 



252 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

of personality. The real source of these theo- 
ries as to a deeper self and a double conscious- 
ness lies, indeed, not in the psychological facts, 
but in motives of a very different character. 
We shall turn presently to these more hidden 
impulses, as they will show us the real springs 
of mysticism ; but we must first glance at our 
fourth and last group of claims, — the wonders 
of spiritualism. 

So long as we consider spiritualism only from 
the point of view of its agreement with the sys- 
tem of scientific psychology, the discussion may 
be extremely short, for one sweeping word is 
sufficient. There are no subtle discriminations 
necessary, as in the other fields : the psycholo- 
gist rejects everything without exception. We 
have here not the slightest relation to philo- 
sophical spiritualism, either to that of the Berke- 
leian type or to that of Fichte. We are not on 
the height of philosophical thinking, but on the 
low ground of observation and explanation of 
empirical facts. The question is not whether 
the substance of the real world is spiritual ; it is 
only whether departed spirits enter into com- 
munication with living men by mediums and 
by incarnation. The scientist does not admit a 
compromise : with regard to this he flatly denies 
the possibility. Of course he does not say that 
all the claims are founded on fraud. He does 
not deny that sincere persons have frequently 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 253 

believed, through hallucinations, and still oftener 
through illusions, that they saw the apparitions 
of departed friends and heard their voices. The 
psychologist has no dearth of explanations for 
this product of the psychophysical mechanism. 
In the same way, he need not doubt that many 
of the mediums really believe themselves to be 
under the control of departed souls ; for this 
also exactly fits many well-known facts of nerv- 
ous disturbance. But the facts as they are 
claimed do not exist, and never will exist, and 
no debate makes the situation better. 

VI 

Our short survey of the wide domain of mys- 
ticism is finished. We have seen what part of 
its claims can be acknowledged by psychology, 
and what must be rejected. We have seen that 
many of those occurrences which appear mys- 
terious and uncanny to the naive mind are easily 
understood from a scientific point of view, and 
are often separated by an impassable chasm from 
happenings which on the surface look quite 
similar. We have seen especially that hypnotism 
and hysteria, muscle reading and hyperesthesia, 
alternation of personality and the therapeutic in- 
fluence of psychophysical inhibitions, hallucina- 
tions and illusions, and other mental states which 
psychology understands just as well as it does 
the normal associations and feelings, explain 



254 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

many of the observed events, and bring them 
from the domain of mysticism into the sphere of 
causally necessary processes. And yet all this 
is only a preamble for our real discussion. We 
have given decisions, but not arguments; we 
have shown that psychology is able to explain 
many of the facts, but we have not shown as 
yet why we have the right to reject other so- 
called facts and to deny their possibility; and 
everything must at last depend upon this right 
alone. 

The modern mystic, if he is ready to follow 
us thus far, would not find the slightest argu- 
ment against his position in any of our preced- 
ing points. He would say : " I accept your 
psychophysical explanations for the facts which 
you acknowledge ; with regard to the others, I 
see only that you are unable to understand them, 
but that gives you no right to deny them. 
There are many facts which are still puzzles for 
science. History must make us modest, show- 
ing that again and again the truth was at first 
ridiculed and the deeper insight derided. These 
very phenomena of hypnotism and automatism 
and hysteria were denied in their reality only a 
few generations ago. Science must give every- 
thing fair play, and a refusal even to examine 
the facts is unworthy of real science. It is nar- 
rowness and stubbornness to reject a fact be- 
cause it does not fit into the scientific system of 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 255 

to-day, instead of striving toward the better sys- 
tem of to-morrow, which will have room for all 
the phenomena ; and this the more if these facts 
are of vast importance, involving the immor- 
tality and the absolute unity of all minds, the 
spiritual harmony of the universe, and the very 
deepest powers of man." 

This is the old text, indeed, preached from so 
often, and sometimes in so brilliant and fascina- 
ting a style that even the best men have lowered 
the sword. Yet it is wrong and dangerous from 
beginning to end, and has endlessly more harm 
in it than a superficial view reveals, as it is in 
its last consequences not only the death of real 
science, but worse, — the death of real idealism. 

First a word about the so-called facts. Our 
newspapers, magazines, and books are full to 
overflowing of the reports of happenings which 
no science can explain, and which may over- 
whelm the uncritical mind by their sheer bulk. 
But whoever stops to think for a moment how 
the psychological conditions favor and almost 
enforce the weedlike growth of mysterious sto- 
ries will at least agree that a live criticism must 
sift the tales, even if they are backed by the au- 
thority of a most trustworthy sailor or a most 
excellent servant girl. If the glaring light of 
criticism is thrown on this twilight literature, the 
effect is often surprising. Some of the " facts " 
prove to be simply untrue, having grown up 



256 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

through gossip and desire for excitement, through 
fear and curiosity, through misunderstandings 
and imagination. Another set of the " facts " 
turns out to be true, but not mysterious ; being 
merely a checkered field of abnormal mental 
phenomena, such as hypnotism, somnambulism, 
hysteria, insanity, hy perse sthesia, automatic ac- 
tion, and so forth. Another large group is based 
on conscious or unconscious fraud, from the 
mildest form down through a long scale to the 
boldest spiritualistic forgery. If we take away 
these three large groups, there is a remainder 
which may deserve discussion as to its interpre- 
tation. Here belong the chance occurrences 
which appear alarmingly surprising if taken in 
isolation, but quite natural if considered as mem- 
bers of a long series, giving account of all the 
cases in which the surprising coincidences did 
not occur. The recent statistics of apparitions 
and hallucinations show clearly the difficulty of 
finding always the right basis for such calcula- 
tion of mathematical probabilities. Here belong, 
further, the illusions of memory, by which pre- 
sent experiments are projected into the past, or 
past experiences are transformed by present sen- 
sations; the surprising coincidences illustrated 
by recent experiments, which are produced by 
the concordance of associations and other simi- 
larities of mental dispositions ; and the illusions 
of perception which allow us to hear and see 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 257 

whatever we expect or whatever is suggested 
to us. 

If we are ready to make full use of every 
means of possible explanation, there remains 
hardly an instance where it is impossible to tear 
aside the veil of mystery, and to explain psy- 
chologically either the occurrences of the facts 
themselves, or the development of the erroneous 
report about them. Even when long series of 
careful experiments on thought transference and 
similar problems were made, the cautious papers 
discreetly reported in most cases, not that a 
proof was furnished, but only that the evidence 
seemed to point in a certain direction. And 
even the most ardent believer in telepathy, Mr. 
Podmore, concedes that " each particular case is 
susceptible of more or less adequate explanation 
by some well-known cause." Mr. Podmore con- 
siders it absurd to accumulate the strained and 
complicated explanations which thus become ne- 
cessary, instead of accepting the simple whole- 
sale interpretation that telepathy took place. 
But with the same right we might say that in 
an endless number of instances the lowest ani- 
mals and plants rise from inorganic substances ; 
each case taken separately could be explained by 
biologists from procreation, but since such expla- 
nation would involve an accumulation of com- 
plicated theories about the conditions of life for 
the lowest animals, it would be much simpler to 
believe in generatio equivoca. 



258 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

Our presupposition was that a large propor- 
tion of the claims are false. Even the cham- 
pions of mysticism are to-day ready to admit that 
the temptations and chances for deception are 
discouragingly numerous. Not only is there an 
abundance of money-making schemes which fit 
well the natural credulity and suggestibility of 
the public at large. Some lie and cheat merely 
for art's sake, getting pleasure from the fact that 
their fiction becomes real through the belief that 
it awakes, and some do the same merely in boy- 
ish trickery. Some elaborate their inventions to 
make themselves interesting, and some feast in 
the power they thus gain over men. Some 
begin by consciously embellishing the slender 
facts, and end with a sincere belief in their own 
superstructure ; and others, through hysterical 
excitement, are unaware of their own cheating. 
Add to these causes the incorrectness with which 
most men observe and report on matters in 
which their feelings are interested, and the mis- 
erable lack of the feeling of responsibility with 
which average men and average papers put forth 
their wild tales. Consider how again and again 
the honored leaders of mystical movements have 
been unmasked as cheap impostors and their 
admired wonders recognized as vulgar tricks, 
how telepathic performances have been reduced 
to a simple signaling by breathing or noises, 
and how seldom disbelievers have interrupted a 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 259 

materialization seance without putting their hands 
on a provision of beards and draperies. Think 
of all this, and the supposed facts dwindle more 
and more. 

At this point of the discussion the friends of 
mysticism like to go over to a more personal 
attack. They say, " How do you dare to pre- 
suppose credulity and suggestibility in the ob- 
server, and intended or unintended tricks and 
dishonesty in the performer, when you have 
never taken part in such experiments, and when 
some brilliant scholars have examined them and 
found no fraud ? " To such personal reproach 
I answer with personal facts. It is true I have 
never taken part in a telepathic experiment or in 
a spiritualistic seance. It is not a nervous dis- 
like of abnormalities which has kept me away, 
as I have devoted much time to the study of 
hypnotism and insanity. The experiences of 
some of my friends, however, made me cautious 
from the beginning ; they had spent much 
energy and time and money on such mysteries, 
and had come to the conviction that all was 
humbug. Once, I confess, I wavered in my 
decision. In Europe I received a telegram from 
two famous telepathists asking me to come 
immediately to a small town where they had dis- 
covered a medium of extraordinary powers. It 
required fifteen hours' traveling, and I hesitated ; 
but the report was so inspiring that I finally 



260 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

packed my trunks. Just then came a second 
message with the laconic words, " All fraud." 
Since that time I do not take the trouble to 
pack. I wait quietly for the second message. 

Why do I avoid these seances ? It is not 
because I am afraid that they would shake my 
theoretical views and convince me of mysticism, 
but because I consider it undignified to visit 
such performances, as one attends a variety 
show, for amusement only, without attempting 
to explain them, and because I know that I 
should be the last man to see through the 
scheme and discover the trick. I should cer- 
tainly have been deceived by Madame Blavatsky, 
the theosophist, and by Miss Paladino, the me- 
dium. I am only a psychologist, not a detective. 
More than that, by my whole training I am ab- 
solutely spoiled for the business of the detective. 
The names of great scientists, like Zoellner, 
Bichet, Crookes, and many others, do not im- 
pose on me in the least ; for their daily work in 
scientific laboratories was a continuous training 
of an instinctive confidence in the honesty of 
their cooperators. I do not know another pro- 
fession in which the suspicion of possible fraud 
becomes so systematically inhibited as it does in 
that of the scientist. He ought to be at once 
dismissed from the jury, and a prestidigitator 
substituted. Whether I personally take part in 
such meetings or not is, therefore, without any 






PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 261 

consequences; I take it for granted from the 
start that wherever there was fraud in the play, 
I should have been cheated like my brethren. 
The only thing that the other side can reason- 
ably demand from us is that we be fully ac- 
quainted with their claims and with the evidence 
they furnish in their writings. I confess I have 
not had quite a good conscience in this respect ; 
I had not really studied all the recorded Phan- 
tasms of the Living and all the Proceedings of 
the Societies for Psychical Kesearch, and I am 
afraid I had forgotten to cut the leaves of some of 
the occult magazines on my own shelves. Now, 
however, my conscience is fully disburdened. I 
used — or ought I to say, misused ? — my last 
summer vacation in working through more than 
a hundred volumes of the so-called evidence. I 
passed through a whole series of feelings. In- 
deed, I had at first a feeling of mysterious 
excitement from all those uncanny stories, but 
that changed into a deep sesthetical and ethical 
disgust, which flattened finally into the feeling 
that there was about me an endless desert of 
absolute stupidity. I, for one, am to-day far 
more skeptical than before I was driven to ex- 
amine the evidence ; I have studied the proofs, 
and now feel sure of what before I only sus- 
pected, — that they do not prove anything ; and 
if we condemn science on such testimony, we do 
worse than those who condemned the witches and 



262 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

vampires. In short, I believe that the facts, if 
they are examined critically, are never incapable 
of a scientific explanation ; and yet even this is 
not the central point of the question. I must 
deny that the battle is waged over the facts 
-which science understands and those which it 
does not understand. 

VII 

No scientist in the world feels uncomfortable 
over the confession that there are many — end- 
lessly many — things in the world which we do 
not know; no sane man dreams that the last 
day of scientific progress has yet come, and that 
every problem has been solved. On the con- 
trary, the springs of scientific enthusiasm lie in 
the conviction that we stand only at the beginning 
of knowledge, and that every day may unveil 
new elements of the universe. Even physio- 
logical psychology, which seems so conceited in 
the face of mysticism, admits how meagre is the 
knowledge it has so far gleaned. Almost every 
important question of our science is still un- 
settled, and yet that has never discouraged us in 
our work. The physicist and the astronomer, 
the chemist and the botanist, the physiologist 
and the psychologist, work steadily, with the 
conviction that there are many facts which they 
do not know, like the Roentgen rays ten years 
ago, and that many facts are not fully under- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 263 

stood, like the Koentgen rays at present. If the 
mystical facts were merely processes which we do 
not understand to-day, but which we may under- 
stand to-morrow, there would not be the slightest 
occasion for a serious dispute. But the situa- 
tion is very different. The antithesis is not 
between the facts we can explain and the facts 
we cannot explain, and for which we seek an 
explanation of the same order. No; it is be- 
tween the facts which are now explicable by 
causal laws, or may be so in any possible future, 
and those facts which are acknowledged as in 
principle outside of the necessary causal connec- 
tions, and bound together by their values for 
our personal feelings instead of by mechanical 
laws. As Professor James puts it excellently : 
It is the difference between the personal emo- 
tional and the impersonal mechanical thinking, 
between the romantic and the rationalistic views 
of the world. Here lies the root of the problem, 
and here centres our whole interest. Indeed, all 
that is claimed by the mystic as such means, not 
that the causal connections of the world found 
so far are still incomplete and must be supple- 
mented by others, but that the blanks in the 
causal connections allow us glimpses of another 
world behind, — an uncausal emotional world 
which shines through the vulgar world of me- 
chanics. 

If the astronomer calculated the movement of 



264 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

a star from the causally working forces, lie might 
come to the hypothesis that there are centres of 
attraction existing which we have not yet discov- 
ered : it was thus Leverrier discovered Neptune. 
But his boldest theories operate only with quan- 
tities of the same order, with substances and 
forces which come under the categories of the 
mechanical world. If, on the other hand, he 
considered some emotional view, perhaps the 
aesthetical one that the star followed this curve 
because it is more beautiful, as indeed an older 
astronomy did; or the ethical one that this 
movement of the star occurred because it served 
to make the moral progress of men possible, 
while the causal movement would have thrown 
the earth into the sun; or the religious one 
that the angels chose to pull the star this way 
rather than that ; or the poetical one that the 
star was obliged to move just so in order to 
delight the heart on a clear evening by its spar- 
kling, — in none of these cases would he be 
doubtful whether his hypothesis were good or 
bad ; he would be sure that it was not an astro- 
nomical hypothesis at all. He would not search 
with the telescope to find out whether or not his 
theory was confirmed by new facts. No; he 
would see that his thought denied the possibility 
of astronomy, and was a silly profanation of 
ethics and religion at the same time. 

The naturalist knows, if he understands the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 265 

philosophical basis of his work, and is not merely 
a technical craftsman, that natural science means, 
not a simple cast and copy of the reality, but a 
special transformation of reality, a conceptual 
construction of unreal character in the service of 
special logical purposes. The naturalist does 
not think that bodies are in reality made from 
atoms, and that the movements of the stars are 
really the products of all the elementary im- 
pulses into which his calculation disintegrates 
the causes. He knows that all his elements, the 
elementary substances and the elementary forces, 
are merely conceptions worked out for the pur- 
pose of representing the world as a causally 
connected mechanism. The real world is no 
mechanism, but a world of means and aims, 
objects of our will and of our personal purposes. 
But one of these purposes is to conceive the 
world as a mechanism, and so long as we work 
in the service of this purpose we presuppose that 
the world is a mechanism. In the effort to re- 
present the world as a causal one — that is, in 
our character as naturalists — we know only a 
causal world, and no other. We may know 
little about that postulated causal world, but we 
are sure beforehand that whatever the future 
may discover about it must belong to the causal 
system, or it is wrong. We are free to choose 
the point of view, but when we have chosen it 
we are bound by its presuppositions. A natu- 



266 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

ralist who begins to doubt whether the world is 
everywhere causal misunderstands his own aim 
and gives up his only end. 

These simple facts from the methodology of 
science repeat themselves exactly, though in a 
more complicated form, for psychology. Psy- 
chology, also, is never a mere copy of the 
reality, but always a transformation in the ser- 
vice of a special logical purpose. Our real 
inner life is not a complex of elementary sensa- 
tions, as psychology may see it : it is a system of 
attitudes of will, which we do not perceive as 
contents of consciousness, but which we live 
through, and objects of will which are our 
means and ends and values. It becomes a 
special interest of the logical attitude of the will 
to transform this real will system in conceptual 
form into a causal system, too, and, in the ser- 
vice of this end, to put in the place of the 
teleological reality a mechanical artificial con- 
struction. This construction is psychology, and 
it is thus clear that in the psychological system 
itself every view which is not causal is contra- 
dictory to the presuppositions, and therefore 
scientifically untrue. Between the mental facts, 
in so far as they are considered as psychological 
phenomena, there exists no other possible con- 
nection than the causal one, though, to be sure, 
this causal view has not the slightest meaning 
for the inner reality, which never consists of 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 267 

psychological phenomena. This is the point 
which even philosophers so easily overlook : as 
soon as we speak of psychical objects, of ideas 
and feelings and volitions, as contents of con- 
sciousness, we speak of an artificial transforma- 
tion to which the categories of real life no longer 
apply, — a transformation which lies in the 
direction of causal connection, and which has, 
therefore, a right to existence only if the right 
to extend the causal aspect of nature to the inner 
life is acknowledged. The personal, the emo- 
tional, the romantic, in short the will-view, con- 
trols our real life, but from that standpoint 
mental life is never a psychical fact. 

It is one of the greatest dangers of our time 
that the naturalistic point of view, which decom- 
poses the world into elements for the purpose of 
causal connection, interferes with the volitional 
point of view of the real life, which can deal 
only with values, and not with elements. I 
have sought again and again to point out this 
unfortunate situation, and to show that history 
and practical life, education and art, morality 
and religion, have nothing to do with these psy- 
chological constructions, and that the categories 
of psychology must not intrude into their teleo- 
logical realms. But that does not blind me to 
the fact that exactly the opposite transgression 
of boundaries is going on all the time, too. If 
the world of values is intruded into the causal 



268 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

world, if the categories which belong to reality- 
are forced on the system of transformation which 
was framed in the service of causality, we get a 
cheap mixture which satisfies neither the one 
aim nor the other. Just this is the effort of 
mysticism. It is the personal, emotional view 
applied, not to the world of reality, where it fits, 
but to the physical and psychical worlds, both 
of which are constructed by the human logical 
will for the purpose of an impersonal, unemo- 
tional causal system. But to mix values with 
laws destroys not only the causal links, but also 
the values. The ideals of ethics and religion, 
instead of growing in the world of volitional 
relations, are now projected into the atomistic 
structure, and thus become dependent upon its 
nature. Intended to fill there the blanks in the 
causal system, they find their right of existence 
only where ignorance of nature leaves such 
blanks, and must tremble at every step of pro- 
gress science makes. It is bad enough when 
the psychological categories are wrongly pushed 
into ethics by the over-extension of psychology, 
but it is still more absurd when ethics leaves its 
home in the real world and creeps over to the 
field of psychology, satisfied with the few places 
to which science has not yet acquired a clear 
title. Our ethics and religion may thus be 
shaken to-morrow by any new result of labora- 
tory research, and must be supported to-day by 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 269 

the telepathic performances of hysteric women. 
Our belief in immortality must rest on the gos- 
sip which departed spirits utter in dark rooms 
through the mouths of hypnotized business medi- 
ums, and our deepest personality comes to light 
when we scribble disconnected phrases in auto- 
matic writing. Is life then really still worth 
living ? 

VIII 

We must here throw more light on some 
details which may be difficult to understand. 
We have said that the claims of mysticism im- 
pose the emotional teleological categories upon 
the psychological facts ; that is, upon construc- 
tions which are formed for the purpose of the 
mechanical categories only. It may not be at 
once evident how this is true for special propo- 
sitions of a mystical nature. Of course we can- 
not develop here the presuppositions of psycho- 
logy ; a few words to show the nature of the 
problems must be sufficient. Psychology tries 
to consider the mental life as a system of per- 
ceivable objects which are necessarily determined ; 
every transformation which is serviceable for this 
purpose is psychologically true. If the mental 
facts are thought as determining one another, 
we must presuppose that they have characteris- 
tics to which this effective influence attaches. 
These characteristics are called their elements, 



270 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

and therefore, for psychologists, the mental life 
consists of elements. The psychical material is 
different from the physical by the presupposition 
that it exists for one subject only. It is there- 
fore not communicable ; since incommunicable, 
it is not determinable by communicable units, 
and hence is not measurable, — not quantitative, 
but only qualitative. Consequently, it is incapa- 
ble of entering into a mathematical equation, and 
is unfit to play the role of determinable causes 
and effects. Before psychical elements can be 
transformed into a system of causes and effects 
a further transformation must be made ; they 
must be thought as amalgamated with physical 
processes which exist for many, and which are 
measurable, and therefore capable of forming a 
necessary causal system. The psychical facts 
are thus thought of as accompaniments of physi- 
cal processes, and in their appearance and disap- 
pearance fully determined by the physical events. 
There is no materialistic harm in this doctrine, 
as it aims at no reference to reality, but is merely 
a construction for a special purpose ; within its 
sphere, however, there cannot be any exception. 
If the psychical facts are thought of as accom- 
paniments of the physical processes, they must be 
projected into the physical world, and must 
accept its forms of existence, space and time. 
The real inner life in its teleological reality is 
spaceless and timeless, — it knows space and 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 271 

time only as forms of its objects ; the psycholo- 
gical phenomena themselves enter into space and 
time as soon as they are connected with the 
physical phenomena. They are now psycho- 
physical elements which can determine one an- 
other only by the causal relations of the physical 
substratum. The working hypothesis of modern 
psychology — that every mental state is a com- 
plex of psychical elements, of which each is the 
accompaniment of a physical process in time and 
space, and influences others or is influenced by 
others merely through the medium of physical 
processes — is then not an arbitrary theory. It 
is the necessary outcome of the presuppositions 
which the human will has freely chosen for its 
logical purposes, and to which it is bound by its 
own decision. 

From this point a full light of explanation 
falls upon all our earlier decisions. We rejected 
every claimed fact in which the psychological 
facts were without a physical substratum, as in 
the case of departed spirits and those in which 
psychical facts influenced one another without 
physical intermediation, as in telepathy. If 
mental life is taken in its reality, it must not be 
considered as composed of elements, ideas, and 
feelings, but must be taken as a whole ; then it 
is not in bodily personalities, not in space and 
not in time, — in short, is not a psychological 
fact at all. But if we take it as psychological 



272 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

fact in human bodies and in time, it must be 
thought of in accordance with the psychological 
presuppositions, as bound to the physical events, 
communicated by their intermediation and disap- 
pearing at their destruction. Where these con- 
ditions are in part wanting, psychology declines 
to accept the propositions as truths, and de- 
mands a further transformation of the facts till 
the demands of psychology are satisfied. Mysti- 
cism, however, prefers an easier way. Where- 
ever the conditions of psychological truth are 
absent, and, owing to the lack of physical sub- 
strata or of physical mediation, the psychical facts 
are disconnected or unexplained in their exist- 
ence, there mysticism imports the teleological 
links of the prepsychological real world, and 
gives the illusion that the psychical facts have 
been thus explained and connected. 

Perhaps most instructive in this respect are 
those claims of mysticism which refer to the 
healing influences of men, because here it ap- 
pears most clearly that it is not the facts, but 
only the points of view, which constitute the 
mysticism. The facts from which these claims 
arise the psychologist does not deny at all ; as 
we have seen, he takes them for granted. But 
he explains them by suggestion and other famil- 
iar laws of mental action, and thus links the 
psychical phenomena by an uninterrupted chain 
of physical processes. The mystic, on the other 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 273 

hand, brings the same facts under the categories 
which belong to the world of values : prayer has 
now a healing influence, not because it is per- 
ceived by the senses of the patient, and works 
through association some inhibitory changes in 
his brain, but because prayer is ethically and 
religiously valuable. Not its physiological ac- 
companiments which produce psychophysical 
effects, but its goodness and piety secure success, 
and, conversely, the illness which is cured by 
the prayer must be a symptom of moral and 
religious obliquity. The causal conception of a 
disturbance of physiological functions is thus 
transmuted into the ethical conception of sin. 
Exactly the same psychophysical facts, the 
prayer of the transmitter and the feeling of 
improvement in the receiver, are in this case, 
then, connected by the mystic and the scientist 
in different ways, without any need on either 
side of a further transformation of the facts. 
For the one, it is the causal process that a sug- 
gestion psychophysical^ overpower nervous inhi- 
bition ; for the other, it is the victory of saint- 
hood over sin, by its religious values. If the 
scientist maintains that only the first is an 
explanatory connection, the second not, does he 
mean by this that goodness has no power over 
evil ? Certainly not ; he means something very 
different. Goodness and evil, he thinks, are 
relations and attitudes of will, which have their 



274 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

reality in being willed and lived through. They 
are not psychophysical facts, to be perceived as 
taking time, and going on in space in a special 
brain and nervous system. They belong to the 
world of willing subjects, not to the world of 
atomistic objects ; they are primary, while sug- 
gestions and inhibitions and all the other psycho- 
physical objects are unreal derived constructions. 
If prayer and sin are taken in their reality as we 
live through them, then of course their meaning 
and their value alone are in question, and it 
would be absurd to apply to them the relations 
of causal connection. As realities, they are not 
brain processes; as such, they do not come in 
question as processes in time and space ; as such, 
they are not transmuted into mere objects. If 
we take them in their reality as will-attitudes, 
they have no relation to causality. If we take 
them as psychological processes which go on in 
time in physical personalities, then we have 
transformed them in the service of causality, and 
have pledged ourselves to the causal system. 
An ethical connection of psychophysical facts is 
a direct inner contradiction ; it means applying 
the categories of will to objects which we have 
taken away from the will for the single purpose 
of putting them into a system of will-less cate- 
gories. We might just as well demand that the 
figures of a painting should talk and move 
about. 






PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 275 

IX 

Another case in which scientists and mystics 
agree in regard to the facts is that of double 
personality. The difference here, also, is only 
one of interpretation. We have seen that the 
psychologist understands this class of facts as 
various degrees of disaggregation of psychophy- 
sical elements, whereas the mystic introduces the 
ethical categories of different responsibility and 
dignity. It is otherwise with the telepathic or 
spiritualistic claims : here there is no agreement 
about the facts, and yet the principle is the 
same as in the other cases. The mystic applies 
the emotional personal links in this case, also, 
not to the reality, but to psychological facts in a 
stage of transformation which the psychologist 
does not accept because they do not allow causal 
connection. The psychologist calls the claimed 
facts untrue, because the transformation of real- 
ity is psychologically or physically true only 
when it has reached that form in which it fits 
into the causal system. It is the aim of science 
to find the true facts, — that is, to transform 
reality till the ends of causal ordering are at- 
tained ; and if they are not attained, the objects 
have not become a part of the existing psycho- 
logical or physical world. An infinite number 
of facts appear to us in disconnected form, but 
we ignore them; they remain only propositions; 



276 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

they have not existence, because they do not 
fulfill the conditions upon which, according to 
the decision of the will which produces science, 
psychical or physical existence depends. That a 
fact is true in the world of psychical facts means 
that it is selected as fit for a special logical 
purpose ; and if the telepathic facts, for instance, 
are not suited to that purpose, they are not true 
according to the only consistent standard of 
truth. They must become somehow otherwise ; 
that is, they must be transformed until they can 
be accepted as existing. The history of science 
constantly demonstrates this necessity. It is 
absurd for the mystics to claim the backing of 
history because it shows that many things are 
acknowledged as true to-day which were not 
believed in earlier times. The teaching of his- 
tory, on the contrary, annihilates almost cruelly 
every claim of mysticism, as, far from a later 
approval of mystical wisdom, history has in 
every case remoulded the facts till they have 
become causal ones. If the scientists of earlier 
times disbelieved in phenomena as products of 
witchcraft, and believe to-day in the same phe- 
nomena as products of hypnotic suggestion and 
hysteria, the mystics are not victorious, but 
defeated. As long as the ethical category of 
Satanic influence was applied to the appearances 
they were not true ; as soon as they were brought 
under the causal categories they were accepted 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 277 

as true, but they were then no longer mystical, — 
it was not witchcraft any more. 

This process of transformation goes on stead- 
ily ; millions of propositions which life suggests 
remain untrue till they are adjusted. Just this 
would be the fate of the telepathic propositions: 
they would remain below the threshold of the 
world of empirical facts, if a mistaken emotional 
attitude did not awaken the illusion that there 
exists here a connection capable of satisfying the 
demand for explanation. The personal impor- 
tance then links what ought to be linked by 
impersonal causality. A feeling of depression 
in the psychophysical organism and the death of 
a friend a thousand miles distant have for us no 
causal connection, but an emotional one. The 
two events have no relation in the sphere of 
objects ; they are connected only in the sphere 
of will-acts ; and the link is not the goodness, 
as in the case of healing by prayer, but the 
emotional importance of the death for the 
friend's feeling attitude. By this will-connec- 
tion the two phenomena are selected and linked 
together, and offer themselves as one fact, while 
without that emotional unity they would remain 
disconnected, and therefore in this combination 
they would not be accepted in the sphere of 
empirical facts. 

Does the scientist maintain, in his opposition 
to telepathy, that in reality mental communica- 



278 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

tion between subjects is possible only by physi- 
cal intermediation? Decidedly not. If I talk 
with others whom I wish to convince, there is 
no physical process in question ; mind reaches 
mind, thought reaches thought ; but in this 
aspect thoughts are not psychophysical pheno- 
mena in space and time, but attitudes and propo- 
sitions in the sphere of the will. If we take our 
mental life in its felt reality, then the emotional 
conviction that no physical wall intervenes be- 
tween mind and mind is the only correct one ; 
it would be even meaningless to look for physi- 
cal connection. But if we transform the reality 
into psychological objects in time and in bodies, 
then we are bound by the aim of the transfor- 
mation, and we can acknowledge their connec- 
tion as true only if it is a mechanical one. 

Finally, the ethical demand for immortality, 
when applied to the artificial construction of 
psychology instead of to the real life, brings out 
the most repulsive claim of mysticism, — spirit- 
ualism. The ethical belief in immortality means 
that we as subjects of will are immortal; that 
is, that we are not reached by death. For the 
philosophical mind which sees the difference 
between reality and psychological transforma- 
tion, immortality is certain ; for him, the denial 
of immortality would be even quite meaningless. 
Death is a biological phenomenon in the world 
of objects in time ; how then can death reach a 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 279 

reality which is not an object, but an attitude, 
and therefore neither in time nor in space? Our 
real inner subjective life has its felt validity, not 
in time, but beyond time ; it is eternal. We 
have seen why the purpose of psychology de- 
mands that this non-local and non-temporal sub- 
jectivity shall be transformed into a psychical 
object, and as such projected into the space- and 
time - filling organism. By that demand the 
mental life itself becomes a process in time; and 
if the ethical demand for immortality is now 
transplanted into this circle of constructed phe- 
nomena, there must result a clash between 
psychology and human emotion. Conceiving 
mental life as a process in time was done merely 
for the purpose of representing it as the accom- 
paniment of physical phenomena, and now to 
demand that it should go on in time after the 
destruction of this physical substratum is absurd. 
In so far as we conceive mental life as an artificial 
psychological process in time, in so far we think 
of it only as part of a psychophysical phenome- 
non, and thus never without a body, disappearing 
when the body ceases to function. To the 
ethical idealist this impossibility of the psycho- 
logical immortality is a revelation; for such 
pseudo- immortality could satisfy only the low 
and vulgar instincts of man, and not his eth- 
ical feelings. Only to a cheap curiosity can it 
appear desirable that the inner life viewed as a 



280 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

series of psychological facts shall go on and 
on, that we may be able to see what is to hap- 
pen in a thousand or in a million years. Life 
seen from a psychological point of view as a 
mere chain of psychological phenomena is utterly 
worthless. It would be intolerable for seventy 
years ; who would desire it for seventy million 
years? Multiplication by zero always leads 
back to naught. And even if we perceive all 
the facts of the universe for all time to come, is 
that of any value? We should shiver at the 
thought of knowing all that is printed in one 
year, or all that men of a single town feel pass- 
ing through their minds; how intolerable the 
thought of knowing even all that is and that 
will be ! It is like the thought of endlessness in 
space : if we were to grow endlessly tall, so that 
we became large like the universe, reaching with 
our arms to the stars, physically almighty, would 
our lif e be more worth living, would it be better 
or nobler or more beautiful ? No ; extension in 
space and time has not the slightest ethical 
value, for it necessarily refers only to those 
objects which exist in space or time, and all our 
real values lie beyond it. The mortality of the 
psychological phenomena and the immortality of 
our real inner life belong necessarily together, 
and the claim that the deceased spirits go on 
with psychological existence is therefore not 
only a denial of the purposes for which the idea 



PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 281 

of psychological existence is constructed, but 
also a violation of the ethical belief in immor- 
tality. 

Here, then, as everywhere, mysticism means 
nothing else than the attempt to force the 
emotional categories on an unreal construction, 
whose only presupposition was that it had to be 
constructed as an unemotional objective mech- 
anism. The result is a miserable changeling, 
which satisfies neither the one side nor the 
other. If mysticism is not contented with the 
childish or hysteric pleasure of throwing obsta- 
cles in the way of advancing science, it can 
have, indeed, little satisfaction from its own 
crippled products. Thousands and thousands 
of spirits have appeared; the ghosts of the 
greatest men have said their say, and yet the 
substance of it has been always the absurdest 
silliness. Not one inspiring thought has yet 
been transmitted by this mystical way ; only the 
most vulgar trivialities. It has never helped to 
find the truth ; it has never brought forth any- 
thing but nervous fear and superstition. 

We have the truth of life. Its realities are 
subjective acts, linked together by the categories 
of personality, giving us values and ideals, har- 
mony and unity and immortality. But we have, 
as one of the duties of life, the search for the 
truth of science which transforms reality in 
order to construct an impersonal system, and 



282 PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM 

gives us causal explanation and order. If we 
force the system of science upon the real life, 
claiming that our life is really a psychophysical 
phenomenon, we are under the illusion of psy- 
chologism. If, on the other hand, we force the 
views of the real life, the personal categories, 
upon the scientific psychophysical phenomena, 
we are under the illusion of mysticism. The 
result in both cases is the same. We lose the 
truth of life and the truth of science. The real 
world loses its values, and the scientific world 
loses its order; they flow together in a new 
world controlled by inanity and trickery, unwor- 
thy of our scientific interests and unfit for our 
ethical ideals. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abnormal mental life, 107, 119, 

134. 
Action theory, 93-99. 
^Esthetic creation, 154-157. 
^Esthetic enjoyment, 158-162. 
^Esthetic prescriptions, 163-169. 
Analysis, 44. 

Apperception theory, S8-92. 
Appreciation, 24. 
Art, 145-178, 202-204. 
Association theory, 88. 
Atoms, 20, 265. 
Axioms, 57. 

Beanty, 174, 201. 
Biography, 216. 
Biology, 72. 
Body, 62. 
Brain, 35-99. 

Causality, 218-222. 
Causal laws, 8, 71, 263. 
Central organ, 74. 
Centrifugal impulses, 92. 
Child psychology, 106-121. 
Christian science, 246, 272. 
Civilization, 77, 217. 
Communication, 44-49. 
Consciousness, 4, 46, 84. 
Conservation of energy, 71. 

Darwinism, 74-78. 

Description, 44-53, 191-194. 

Development, 73-81. 

Division of labor, 77. 

Double consciousness, 249-252. 

Drawing teachers, 147, 163-169, 

177. 
Duty, 172-178, 199, 227. 

Education, 100-144, 163-169. 



Educational theories, 135-143, 

166, 167. 
Elements, 51, 269. 
Emotion, 51. 

Emotional thinking, 263-282. 
Ethical action, 79. 
Ethical laws, 11. 
Existence, 24, 28, 196. 
Existential judgment, 188-191. 
Expectation, 29. 

Experimental aesthetics, 157-162. 
Experimental psychology, 123- 

125, 162. 
Explanation, 53-67, 191-194. 

Freedom, 7, 221. 

Ganglion cells, 83. 
God, 28. 

History, 9, 16, 26, 179-228. 
Hypnotism, 239-249. 

Ideals, 17, 268. 

Ideas, 50. 

Idiographic sciences, 185. 

Immortality, 90, 278. 

Inhibition, 95. 

Innervation feelings, 84, 95. 

Instruction in psychology, 103- 

105. 
Intensity, 85. 

Judgment, 51. 

Laboratory experiments, 158-162. 
Laws, 8, 56, 185-191, 214. 
Life, 23. 
Logical thinking, 22. 

! Materialism, 13, 20. 



286 



INDEX 



Metaphysics, 28, 200. 
Methods of teaching, 129. 
Mind cure, 240, 272. 
Motor centres, 92. 
Muscle reading 1 , 236. 
Muscle sensations, 97. 
Mysticism, 229-282. 

Naturalism, 1-4, 181. 
Natural sciences, 187-191. 
Necessity, 57. 
Nomothetic sciences, 185. 
Normative sciences, 27, 172-178, 
181, 225-228. 

Objects, 24, 171, 200. 
Over-individual will acts, 27, 172- 

178. 
Overman, 77. 

Paidology, 108-111. 

Personality, 4-9, 130, 131, 198, 

209-217. 
Philosophy of history, 215. 
Physical objects, 30, 39. 
Physiological psychology, 35-99, 

125-127. 
Poetry, 148-151. 
Primitivistic art, 168. 
Psycho-educational laboratories, 

141. 
Psychological objects, 31, 267. 
Psychologism, 20. 
Psychophysical parallelism, 42, 64. 

Quality, 85. 
Quantity, 58. 



Rational psychology, 133. 
Reactions, 75. 

Reality, 22-31, 198-200, 265. 
Responsibility, 8. 

Self-observation, 37, 45, 124. 
Sensations, 31, 51, 85, 98. 
Skepticism, 17, 227. 
Social psychology, 26, 154, 155. 
Soul, 72. 
Space, 54, 270. 
Spiritualism, 278-281. 
Structure of the brain, 81-96. 
Subjects, 24. 
Substitution, 32, 53. 
Suggestion, 239-249. 
Symmetry, 160, 161. 

Teachers, 116, 120, 129, 147, 163- 

169. 
Teleological connection, 59, 211, 

224. 
Telep'athy, 236, 243, 275-278. 
Therapeutical influences, 244-249, 

272, 273. 
Time, 14, 270, 279. 
Tools, 77. 
Transformation of reality, 22, 39. 

98. 
Transmission theory, 90. 
Truth, 17, 98. 

Values of sensations, 87. 
Vividness, 86-98. 
Volition, 51. 

Will, 23-28, 30, 172-174, 208-217. 



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